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Turkish Traffic

Robert Vivian

 Thanks to Robert Vivian, beloved lyricist, novelist and teacher, for contributing a dervish essay to Cargo.

 

…and I a new traffic becoming.

    

Is not like any wave or wind chime but allwaves

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.

                                                   Note: Gizem is the Turkish word for mystery.

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About Robert Vivian

Robert Vivian is the author of The Tall Grass Trilogy, Water And Abandon and two meditative essay collections, Cold Snap As Yearning and The Least Cricket Of Evening. His first poetry book is called Mystery My Country--and he's co-written a second called Traversings with the poet Richard Jackson. He teaches at Alma College and as a core faculty member at The Vermont College Of Fine Arts.

Filed Under: Creative Nonfiction Tagged With: Turkey

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