The street where I was born and lived on and off; the one where I still live is called "BehindPalace" possibly because of My great grandfather's long gone mansion or the imposing German Consulate in a way the word "behind" loses its meaning.
Up to 1954, there was only the ten room wooden house with its two station wood heated Turkish bath (which still survives in protest against the mis-care of a somewhat distant cousin who listens to music and wears the same brown tight fitting leather jacket from which I avert my gaze every time we meet) a large wooden door, a short drive-way for horse carriages, two ruins, (a foundation and a cistern) , and a dried up well, hidden by thirty feet or higher walls. The street was about fifteen feet higher, but street vendor and playing children sounds would filter through the antique masonry.
STREET BEYOND THE PALACE
It was a narrow street of cobble stones
used for playing football
and then paved with asphalt
not only for hopscotch by the few girls
but other imagined ball games
while I watched from the corner
on days I dared to leave the high- wall- bound garden
with its rusted car chassis intact with a stick shift or hand break,
a three feet tall foundation,
away from a well with its hole half in the wall
and a cistern next to the large wooden gate
on the steep slope named after a bearded grandfather leading up to the street
where the soccer games were almost as interesting as the bugs and the birds of the garden
and the fruit trees and the foundation where a treasure stayed buried
and the old cistern containing mutilated bodies of discarded linoleum.
My soccer career consisted of the two times I was asked to join one of the teams,
and I missed kicking the ball just as I woke up.
until similar circumstances were presented some years later at school,
but fully awake for the misery.
Children and vendors mingled in my street streams,
both types of memory without artistic merit,
of an unfamiliar world of unknown kids and unappreciated food sold by hungry emaciated old men.
ACC
April 27, 2021
