I Cannot Speak Turkish

I cannot speak Turkish
but yet, and for a moment
at least
we meet in a wordless no-mans' land
and gag from the back of our throats.

You say "No Inglizh"
I cannot speak Turkish, but over the phone
there's a burr at the back of your voice,
which faintly smells of caramel
and there is an intractability to your words
and the consonants of your words
are mysterious concoctions of exotic lenitions
my hand cannot render in ink

I cannot speak Turkish
but this is a business call
and I can feel a waft of stifled office air
On Bayrampaşa Caddesi, as the traffic grumbles by below,
Smelling of two-stroke exhaust.
Hot and irate, sleeves half rolled up hairy forearms,
you sigh as I get lost in phrases strange to me,
and while I summon strength and composition,
I try to find a secret allyway, a wordless way, to lead me out of us
-
of us, and what we have become, two foreign men with useless
throats
and keeping schtumm.

I cannot speak Turkish
and so we respond
to question with question
and statements innocent of each other,
when suddenly, even across the telephone,
when all the words have stopped
we affect a kind of intimacy,
a breathed understanding,
a breeze of telephone crackles, rough wind noises
that touch each disembodied human one of us
and make us close as lovers

I cannot speak Turkish
you cannot speak English
and so
there is nowhere from here left to go.
We mumble apologies without closure
and gently replace the handsets.
Still, I fancy that you are small-smiling and not resenting me,
scratching your nose and thinking quietly
upon our moment unenshrined in words,
upon the lost legend of our silence, and how
the telling of tales never written
is some small recompense for their forgetting.