[Erik Olson]

Part I. of The Thousand and Second Night

I. RIGOR VITAE

Istanbul. 21 March. I woke today
With an absurd complaint. The whole right half
Of my face refuses to move. I have to laugh
Watching the rest of it reel about in dismay

Under the double burden, while its twin
Sags on, though sentient, stupefied.
I’m here alone. Not quite – through fog outside
Loom wingèd letters: PAN AMERICAN.

Twenty-five hundred years this city has stood between
The passive Orient and our frantic West.
I see no reason to be depressed;
There are too many other things I haven’t seen,

Like Hagia Sophia. Tea drunk, shaved and dressed . . .
Dahin! Dahin!


The house of Heavenly Wisdom first became
A mosque, is now a flame-
less void. The apse,
Militantly dislocated,
Still wears those dark-green epaulettes
On which (to the pilgrim who forgets
His Arabic) a wild script of gold whips
Has scribbled glowering, dated
Slogans: “God is my grief!” perhaps,
Or “Byzantine,
Go home!”
Above you, the great dome,
Bald of mosaic, senile, floated
In a gilt wash. Its old profusion’s
Hypnotic shimmer, back and forth between
That of the abacus, that of the nebula,
Had been picked up from the floor,
The last of numberless handfuls
By the last 18th-century visitor.
You did not want to think of yourself for once,
But you had held your head erect
Too many years within such transcendental skulls
As this one not to feel the usual, if no
Longer flattering kinship. You’d let go
Learning and faith as well, you too had wrecked
Your precious sensibility. What else did you expect?

Outdoors. Uprooted, turban-crested stones
Lie side by side. It’s as I might have feared.
The building, desperate for youth, has smeared
All over its original fine bones.

Acres of ocher plaster. A diagram
Indicates how deep in the mudpack
The real façade is. I want my face back.
A pharmacist advises
h