Moving Back

At the Dam

It must be the sun, slowing even the heartiest species, the house sparrows finding the limestone slab strewn with sunflower seeds mid-morning while American and British relatives gobble goldfinch feed by sunrise. The power drill stops breathless after a few minutes, its pounding muted as its energy seeps back to its source, like the Russian generators churning Lake Assad, the old river dammed to a trickle farther north and lost to Turkey’s dimmer light. Cyrillic pronouncements in alien granite dwarf Arabic limestone arabesques more accustomed to the enervating desert, and still nothing happens. The white stone eagle, a legacy of the fifties brought later by Russian Soura whose engineers wrought their cold accounting of Syria’s historic heat.

Last Tour of the Season

Opposite the fortress, the winding streets lead to shuttered steel souks where stones wet with morning once muddied 4000 camels’ feet bringing rabbis reading Torah, Venetian merchants to their khan, Turks who built marble footbaths for daily ablutions today wiped clean by a villager in a red scarf overseen by a fat man holding a white towel to his naked body and staring back at the women as if they’d entered the nearby mosque uncovered, bad as birds building nests in a minaret, basket of twigs above the black dome’s decorated sky, blue mosaics, and colored glass beside God’s gold script facing Mecca from Aleppo, south as the crow flies.

Collected Thoughts

The rare gray through which light strains, restrained for a change, is nothing like cotton. It absorbs nothing. Sound travels below its winter weight, a stray melody from a car window or construction site, Friday prayer loud against the cold chirping of early sparrows.

From the window, limestone yellow against the sky, the rows of black squares, unfinished windows, like a giant martin’s house ready for spring guests. There is no movement, except the undulating chant punctuated by intermittent peeps into closed doors.

A fire burned beside a mannequin, wax trompe d’oeil in an open doorway, casting a tall thin shadow melting in slow motion. Four children climb over a dirt mound and horizontal bars, lintels in the making, a stuffed bird eased over obstacles.

I drag these images along with me on walks as taxis honk for my attention, distracting me like static on a phone line or a bad recording forces concentration on each word that too soon passes, evaporating into meaning obscured.

Moving Back

This window is ground level, off-center, its blinds down under sheer curtains fancy dress over an old-fashioned corset that doesn’t change anything, the blue and white sky above the passing cars, the whoosh of tires like matchbox miniatures my brother raced down upholstered pillows

a time before the one outside, closer to his old bedroom than where I slept last year, waking to routine, boiling tea and sitting, as now, trying to see beyond the window looking out on dusty limestone roofs, distant deserts where something grew for me, seeds from discarded husks and aridity.

Swimming to Syria 40

Swimming to Syria 41