J.D. McClatchy//Cağaloğlu

From the cistern in the dome the daylight drips
While the calls to prayer
From the quarter’s seven minarets-
Overlapping tape loops of Submission-slip
Down through the arching crescent lunettes
Cut into the air
As if the vault itself had loosened its grip.

I am on my back, listening to the tattoo
Of clogs crisscrossing
The sopping white marble floor inlaid
With veins of still darker matters to pursue.
A skittish gleam accents, like eyeshade,
A fountain’s boss in
The corner alcove, where hot and cold make do

In a basin Tony Curtis and Franz Liszt
Both stared into once.
(Stardom is predictable fate:
The point is forgotten but somehow still missed.)
Gods, whenever they annunciate,
Long for romance
That ironclad heroes peering through the mist

Or mousey adolescent girls both provide.
The same unlikely
Places – a battlefield or grotto-
Are returned to, while again the hollow-eyed
Ogle in flagrante devote
And obey, shyly,
The scrambled revelations so true-and-tried.

Congestive, crotch-scented vapor has congealed
Into beads that skid
Along suction-knots and shadow-ends
Abutting my slab. Eager for an ordeal
The illustrated brochure commends
As a bath to rid
The body of its filth both real and unreal,

I have bought their boast, “We make you feel reborn,”
For fifty euros.
Pinched and idly gestured toward a plinth
Two centuries of customers and careworn
To a shallow trough not quite my length,
I’m forced to borrow
Into a pose much more flagellant than faun.

The sodden towel is too heavy now to hold
Itself across me_
And there is the pasha’s bay window,
The shriveled bulblet, the whole ill-shaped scaffold
Of surplus fact and innuendo,
From the beer belly
To the congenital heart flutter’s toehold.

The attendant walks up and down on my back,
Pacing the problem,
Then kneads, then reams, then applies a foam
He scrubs in until is causes an attack
Of radiance, the world’s palindrome
Suddenly solemn,
Suddenly seeming to surrender its knack

For never allowing us simply to want
What we already
Have, or are, or perhaps could have been.
His hand signal to get up seems like a taunt.
I lie there, my fist under my chin,
Senses unsteady,
Something gradually, like a tiny font,

Coming into focus. I sit up and start
To notice small bits
Of grit when I run my hand over
My chest. But wasn’t this debris the chief part
Of the package deal? The makeover
And its benefits?
In the fog I can’t really see what trademark

Schmutz the Oriental Luxury Service
Has failed to wash off.
So I put it in my mouth and taste
Two dank gobbets-salty, glairy and grayish-
I should have recognized as the waste
That was my old self,
A loofah having scraped it from each crevice

And bulge, from every salacious though and deed.
Every good one, too.
It is the past, not just what is wrong,
It is the embarassments we still breast-feed,
That we absent-mindedly so long
To shed. A new you,
Oneself an innate second person succeeds.

How do the saints feel when they fall to their knees,
God coming to light?
Less ecstatic than ashamed, I fear,
Of bodies never worthy of being seized.
Encumbered by the weight of a tear,
In hopeless hindsight
They see all that the flesh can never appease,

All that the flesh is obliged to mortify.
Here I am laid out,
Looking up to where nothing appears,
Hardly wondering why nothing satisfies
And yet saddened that it’s all so clear.
Tulip waterspouts
Trickle. Reservoirs deep underground reply.