Buyuk Londra

for Piers

I see you still

in the Londra Hotel,

charming the parrots

with your polly-phonic skills,

conjuring times before travel was tamed,

when Stamboul trains disgorged magnates and spies,

poets and femmes fatales,

into Sirkeci Gari.

The crowd at the bar practise lines

for parrots to recite

among the fading prints: Old Pera

and the Bosphorus; gilt and Edwardiana.

Your laughter fills the space that language lacks;

gazing up from a glass at cocktail hour,

reflections intact, despite the years:

shaken not stirred.

Alias

I thought my life was my own

till I found you in it,

like a wasp in the jam.

I look in the mirror and see you.

I could almost be you,

if it weren’t for the hat

and the specs,

and that spot on your nose,

or is it mine?

Skype

For Eve

Today or not today, will you be there,

surfing the wilds of cyberspace?

Electrons can’t feel, yet somehow bring

you into the room, a pixelled Giaconda.

Your smile says more than any voice,

its prescience reminding me

that, somewhere beyond telemetry,

all true lines meet.

Camera Obscura

Whose idea was the skull?

Only a party mask,

put on for fun.

Still, you were dying

and we didn’t see:

hands clasped tight,

as I took your photo.

Travelling incognito,

you remain

wrapped in mystery,

leaving us fixed

in your gaze.

Leaving

There’s a lost sense

to this reach,

as if time, not just tide,

has retreated.

A hulk, half sunk,

stares from the mud,

ignored by the estuary birds.

The train struggles on

through sandstone bluffs,

to greet the bay.

Waves break

and you’re a kid again,

daring the cold.

An image pressed

against the glass,

salvaged

from memory.

Casa

The sky, blue chalk

to sketch our world,

tumbling in from the horizon.

Swallows from Africa flit

among the verandah columns.

Time falls away

until our shadows merge.

And somewhere else,

untouched by thought,

wings find a perfect ocean.