Caravanserai - Dawn Creeps in Through the Mist

Caravanserai – Dawn Creeps in Through the Mist

2000+

 jp melville

<song play chris isaak cover london grammar wicked game>

Caravanserai, sleeping above where the camels once slept.

A stone building with wide, tall archways, hosting travellers who now have nowhere to go but toward visiting the past, worlds not yet wholly versions of Dupont and EveReady and Nylon, yet celebrating New Year on December 31^st.

Odd how we travel from airport to airport, from faucet to faucet that turn clockwise to open, from white granular salt that pours to white granular salt that pours...

Yet we long for distinction in our lives, to say that we have been there and done that, there which is where we are not and that which is not this.

And we try to do this by travelling, fucking a no one, and staying in places like those where camels once slept.

Caravanserai…

Where, I wonder, is the stench of manure in the cracks of these cold walls?

Where, I wonder, is the stench of sweat of men who have travelled months,

carrying treasures from one land to the next and back again?

Where are the scimitars protecting gold?

Where are the vocal bellows of bargaining,

among those local traders

who have come to the caravanserai

to buy what might be sold?

In the drifting chant of the imam this four thirty in the morning…

I drift with God

and less and less with humanity…

where I lie awake by candlelight writing these notes

I believe maybe that I hear a world other than mine...

In this caravanserai…

in the hollow eyes of the waiter who brought bread to our table last night

I believe that I see emotion that I will never know…

from the clammy cold walls of this silent room,

I believe I smell the ghosts of men dreaming of their daughters and sons whom they have not seen for half a year or more.

So I consider myself lucky,

for many that I know

my sisters, my brothers, my childhood friends

they could never imagine being here

though… I know that they envy me for being here

they would not understand that I find it

hardly remarkable and wholly transcendent God’s new world only where you and I live

here in Sheki, in the foothills of the Caucasus mountain range…

from where it is conceivable that our white skin was born

from where it is conceivable that the Mohammedans

may have made our world theirs if it had not been for the Khazars and the Jews.

Here I am , blessed,  enshrouded in a wonderful mystery

a fog that has swept down off the mountains

to look out through a tiny stone window into the cobbled courtyard

toward which all the rooms face

no windows to the exterior of the building

even these doorways are arched on this second floor

like those below

and if I wish in this moment I can step out onto an interior veranda

that stretches around the interior of the building

where I smell camel

sweat of men

trading for their families

for the woman they miss so terribly…

Here I am blessed…

to have arrived here with my small family of wife son daughter

at an hour when dusk had just fallen

and the electricity was off

and the call to prayer floated over the town from a dozen minarets

invisible in the falling darkness, the voice of Allah...

Resigned to life as it unfolds

we travel with foreigners

from history

Ali and Nino…

or are we…

Ali and Nino…

Oh… I step from my dream… who am I… alive…. dream…

but they are not…

they are just so ordinary people…

Junus and Chen

so most always the case with foreign aid workers, pleasant enough

easy going, chatty, friendly

work with World Vision

a rather Christian… uhm… organization…

for the most part provides charitable aid in poor countries…

here in Azerbaijan, where I write this thought

they offer food aid, free maize and rice and sardines and cooking oil and beans

from nations like the United States and Canada and Germany

which reminds me that I had once given as a gift to my mother a can of sardines

labelled as food aid from Germany

that I had purchased in a restaurant in some corner of the planet

carried home with me to Canada

a palpable story about the politics of food aid and free food

the idea that food is a weapon…

Ha!

These thoughts generating those sorts of blank stares

where you realize that it is time to laugh

change the subject

because little has or ever will change in this world of ours.

Myself only further dismayed

found myself and my love

travelling with colleagues from the International Rescue Committee

whose history was deleted from my digital space in 2001

we sat with Nick and Lainie, were taking holiday with their little child, Alice

and, for some sake, a collective of parents and grandparents

who had come to visit them from the United States and Britain

a gaggle of gogglers

complete with Gortex and Nikon and four wheel drive Japanese Mitsubishis

backpacks of bright yellow and forest green and Wetnaps for the baby

dinner had been shared together

no one drank too much, no one laughed too much

all was nice and pleasant

photos taken of the children all together

everybody liked the interesting food

cheese and bread and meat on a plate with knives and forks…

later, in the darkness,

I heard voices, somewhere opposite across the courtyard

far away in the mists, clinking glasses filled with gin and tonic brought for the occasion

muffled voices fading, fading, gone…

later, in the darkness

I heard absolute silence from out there beyond the gates

ghosts of history

from among the other (Other)

this room paid for a welcome on the surface

but money making us no more than strangers in a strange land

streams of blood that have never and never will mix…

I shiver, wishing hurriedly for the dawn…

ooohhhh … breath…. breathe…

Of course, my family sleeps, a sleep that I cannot call to me.

The children in their worlds far away from mine.

Their mother even further away, far, far away,

drifting further as we spin mercilessly in this universe,

far from my writing, my poetry, my philosophy,

all of which I understand – mis-understand.

Oddly close as mother of my children.

I love her in our distance to never be reconciled.

Which I also understand, that we are at once one and two,

an eternal tension,

though for us who the rest of us maybe you

are secular and industrial, leading your saccharine existences,

sadly and catastrophically absent of a conscious Whole.

Give up your absolute in love to God?

Ha!

So I continue to write a story to try to explain…

So alone, it is I who is wrapped in these mists of time

my time, my history and our measured in some sense of time

of bloodshed, of lust, of politics so shallow but I believe are true

so true I will kick you out of my house

You will misunderstand a need to leave and sleep

simultaneously bound down

heavily

oh what a weight

by the immeasurably heavy sadness of Nietzsche’s god is dead world.

I wonder, in these close, stone walled rooms of caravanserai

with wooden floors

what pleasures past

that travelling men sought

what worries they had

what fatigue they carried on their shoulders

what thoughts they had of their women and families whom they had left behind

carrying wares from town to town

region to region

land to distant land

through forests and past farms and unprotected villages

wayfaring strangers

like us

you

me

strangers in a strange land...

after all

there is only one home, where one finds one’s heart
oneself in those whom one loves

I am one in the family I raise.

But now, in the earliest hours before dawn, I feel ill.

Again.

On my lip a cold fever sore and several in my mouth,

even in my sinuses and ears.

My skin on my face and on my scalp is sensitive to the touch.

Bowels have stopped moving.

A condition that comes and goes since Guatemala.

How many years ago was that?

Sarcoidosis, the medical system finally called it, after five years of no diagnosis.

Worsened by alcohol and sugar,

which I keep to minimum…

Ha!

But I vomited again several weeks ago

after only several ounces of vodka.

Aggravated by stress?  High workload?

Fear all around me of the Muslim other,

those collapsing buildings in New York,

now genetically stored in the collective consciousness.

Fear which I sense but do not feel.

Either…

I am sick and my subconscious will not protect

or

long ago I left my world far behind

the symptoms I feel

but those of withdrawal

a self-appointed exile

there is no longer a going home.

Dawn creeps in through the mist.

The air is lighter, cooler.

I breathe deeply through my nostrils.

Turn over under my covers.

Wife beside me long gone.

I close my eyes.

I sleep.