Thanks to Robert Vivian, beloved lyricist, novelist and teacher, for contributing a dervish essay to Cargo.
…and I a new traffic becoming.
together,
particulate and alive and crashing their way
to prophecy and magical air between one bumper andthe next on highway to somewhere else soughing
home to reed bed not of this world but blue world
desiring uncontainable sigh and untranslatable spirit,
which must be now, now,
speeding and always, everywhere, and when I car with
them, when I truck and roam, I am carried out of
myself to a glass cup of tea and depths of the Black
Sea spilling outward, and there
is no other road before me but Asia
rolling underneath,
myself a continent and my Hungarian grandmother
who loved so much each day of her life that at the end
she quietly, quietly took off the oxygen mask in her
bathroom in her ragged pink slippers and went to
sleep never to wake again and how yesterday I was in
an accident in Samsun and Turks came from all
around to exclaim and take
pictures and traffic continued, blood roar and beeping
horns and the simit seller bowing under his heavy
burden of round bread and sprinkled seeds walked
across the busy street talking to himself, saying a few
tired or tender words and his shirt darkened with
sweat and I a new traffic becoming, I a
new traffic coming to a skidding stop and roar then
racing toward sundown and the wide awake dream of
when I walked by the Black Sea alone and what did it
mean and where did it go as the waves thrashed in
their chains in the love of a great upheaval, gizem,
gizem, and all the angelic and astonished children
around me, wanting only to run and play in
the streets, beautiful traffic themselves.