Nine Horses Read Free

stand up in the cloudy water
    and reach for a towel,
    time to start concentrating on which way
    I would turn after I had locked the front door,
    what shop signs I would see,
    what bridges I would lean on
    to watch the broad river undulating
    like a long-playing record under the needle of my eye.
    Time to stand dripping wet and wonder
    about the hordes of people
    I would pass in the street, mostly people
    whose existence I did not believe in,
    but a few whom I would glance at
    and see my whole life
    the way you see the ocean from the shore.
    One morning after another,
    I would fan myself dry with a towel
    and wonder about what paintings
    I would stand before that day,
    looking forward to the usual—
    the sumptuous reclining nudes,
    the knife next to a wedge of cheese,
    a landscape with pale blue mountains,
    the heads and shoulders of gods
    struggling with one another,
    a foot crushing a snake—
    but always hopeful for something new
    like yesterday’s white turkeys in a field
    or the single stalk of asparagus on a plate
    in a small gilded frame,
    always ready, now that I am dressed,
    to cheer the boats of the beautiful,
    the boats of the strange,
    as they float down the river of this momentous day.

Istanbul
    It was a pleasure to enter by a side street
    in the center of the city
    a bathhouse said to be 300 years old,
    old enough to have opened the pores of Florence Nightingale
    and soaped the musical head of Franz Liszt.
    And it was a pleasure to drink
    cold wine by a low wood fire
    before being directed to a small room in an upper gallery,
    a room with a carpet and a narrow bed
    where I folded my clothes into a pile
    then came back down, naked
    except for a gauzy striped cloth tucked around my waist.
    It was an odd and eye-opening sensation
    to be led by a man with close-cropped hair
    and spaces between his teeth
    into a steamy marble rotunda
    and to lie there alone on the smooth marble
    watching the droplets fall through the beams
    of natural light in the high dome
    and later to hear the song I sang—
    “She Thinks I Still Care”—echo up into the ceiling.
    I felt like the last of the sultans
    when the man returned and began to scrub me—
    to lather and douse me, scour and shampoo me,
    and splash my drenched body
    with fresh warm water scooped from a marble basin.
    But it was not until he sudsed me
    behind my ears and between my toes
    that I felt myself filling with gratitude
    the way a cloud fills with rain,
    the way a glass pipe slowly fills with smoke.
    In silence I thanked the man
    who scrubbed the bottoms of my feet.
    I thanked the history of the Turkish bath
    and the long chain of bathmen standing unshaven,
    arms folded, waiting for the next customer
    to come through the swinging doors of frosted glass.
    I thanked everyone whose job
    it ever was to lay hands on the skin of strangers,
    and I gave general thanks that I was lying
    facedown in a warm puddle of soap
    and not a warm puddle of blood
    in some corner of this incomprehensible city.
    As one bucket after another
    of warm water was poured over my lowered head,
    I stopped thinking of who and what to thank
    and rode out on a boat of joy,
    a blue boat of marble and soap,
    rode out to the entrance of the harbor
    where I raised a finger of good-bye
    then felt the boat begin to rise and fall
    as it met the roll of the incoming waves,
    bearing my body, my clean, blessed body out to sea.

Love
    The boy at the far end of the train car
    kept looking behind him
    as if he were afraid or expecting someone
    and then she appeared in the glass door
    of the forward car and he rose
    and opened the door and let her in
    and she entered the car carrying
    a large black case
    in the unmistakable shape of a cello.
    She looked like an angel with a high forehead
    and somber eyes and her hair
    was tied up behind her neck with a black bow.
    And because of all that,
    he seemed a little awkward
    in his happiness to see her,
    whereas she was simply there,
    perfectly existing as a