Silk Road
J.S. Absher – United States

“Silk Road” describes a fictional encounter between Islamic and Christian cultures in Cappadocia, an area in modern Turkey famous for its underground fortresses and cities, where citizens would hide from invaders for months at a time.  The bulbs at issue were plants from Central Asia that became available in Europe, often at very high prices, only after the fall of Byzantium in May 1453.

i.
The city fell. Wealth and comforts vanished.
Jasper and sard were pulled from the walls
and the gateposts and tossed on the bonfire.
No longer was there an Empress to regret
she had not more orifices to please
her faithful subjects. Alone, in unlit cells,
religious knelt, Come, Lord Jesus, hammer
into pieces the stone of retribution.

A group of xenoi entered the central market.
We come from Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara
(they said) by way of Baku and Jerevan,
bearing over mountain and plain fritillary,
hyacinth, turban ranunculus. We offer
our perennial splendors in exchange
for little offerings from your walls — those
small sweet smaragds green as the winter sea.

The noblest xenos took from his camel a sack
and with his own hands upended it.
Bulbs came tumbling out, dirty and shriveled.
What sort of splendor is this? an old man asked.
It’s true we are starving, our wives and daughters
have shaved their heads, our oldest boys been seized
to fight our own kind. Though we wait for death,
we will not trade our walls for bags of onions.

ii.
The next day, the traders returned, openly
armed. They searched the whole city to find
someone to barter with, but found it deserted —
the porticos where the Old Men debated,
the courtyards where children ran and women
spread skeins of dyed cloth to dry in the sun,
the armory, the mint, even the guardhouse.

From the tower of St. Sophia,
a solitary bird called pit-pit, pit-pit.
With saber and scabbard the strangers prized
the jewels from the wall. They kicked the bulbs
across the marketplace like horse turds.

iii.
Before moonrise the people of the city
had slipped through a door hidden in the cellar
of the old man’s house. They wondered at the doorposts,
carved like nothing they had ever seen
outside a dream — enormous tusks furred
and stained with age, or the thick hair between
their mothers’ legs. They entered an ancient place
of labyrinthine cul-de-sacs, loopholes
for arrows, kettles for boiling oil,
and cistern, stable, chapel, and granary.

Too restless to stop, they took an eastern passage.
Unnumbered rooms. An endless corridor
that did not always connect the same rooms,
but floated in the darkness — now debouching
in the looted treasury of Ecbatana,
now descending in somnolent slowness
to lapis mines near Firgamu, at last
rising in waking spirals till they could feel
the heat of the sun beating the desert floor.
The old man stamped the dirt
and cried out like a rooster, Aru! Aru!

iv.
The xenoi above them rode their Bactrians east,
slowed by the bags of jewels. They stalled in the Desert
of Lop. Their sleep was troubled by noises
in the earth — the shuffling of feet, the mumbling
and cursing of old men. By day they heard
voices blown in the sand, the strains
of dulcimers and drums, the clash of arms.
Water ran out. They ignited dung to melt
those little stones as cold as the winter sea.

The noblest xenos, lured by the strange noises,
wanders into the dunes. In the distance
he sees a field, it must be a field of home,
as bright with lilies and anemones
as skeins of dyed cloth drying in the sun.
His lips are gummed shut with thirst.
I will weave a basket of reeds (he thinks),
I will fill up the basket with corms and bulbs
plump with moisture, firm as a virgin’s breast,
and those I do not eat and drink today
I will take to the next oasis to trade
for gems of the finest water — citrines
as big as apricots, rubies as red
as the burnt-out eyes of my companions.