More Snow Stories

The snow died off during the day, but came whirling back tonight. I was at Lemon Cafe playing backgammon with Delal and between turns I looked out the window at the snow tumble-falling through the sodium lights. There's a street on the way home lined with bars--out front they have neon lights, green, blue, red, pink. The snow danced past those. And it fell into the Ottoman graveyard too, where there are no lights, just century old graves written in Arabic script and topped with turbans where the snow gathers. There's something lonely about those grave stones standing in the shadows gathering snow--it reminds me of a Robert Lowel Poem about King's Chapel cemetery in Boston, if I'm not mistaken. Where the snow gathers on graves of dead colonialists. This cemetery stretches miles all the way down to the Bosphorus, but only in pieces from here to Uskudar. It pops up here and there between buildings, over railroad tressles, on a busy street corner, behind a gas station. (As I write, it's 9:30. The boza seller is wandering through the streets shouting in slow, melancholy bass notes "Boooooooooooooza". Boza is a hot vanilla drink they sell in the winter--perfect for this weather)