Pausing on a Hillside in Anatolia

Near Izmir, Turkey

I've learned to pause from time to time in this landscape riddled with antiquity where the hills have swallowed whole cities and telltale ruins poke from every slope. Exposed stones like rows of erupting teeth mean walls or roads; columns—whether stubs or towering trunks—mark temples to Artemis.                So when the sound begins

in the distance, so faint at first I mistake it for leaves spooling in the breeze, I stop and wait, I feel it shiver the hair on my arms. It grows louder, from the jingle of coins in an army of pockets to nuggets of ore riding the rim of a prospector's pan, shells churning in surf, the furious tinkling of icicles in a storm.                I used to pause like this,

feeling called, when the college carillon tolled at dusk, hurrying me to my room. Not when it dragged and shuffled through popular tunes, but the classic dirges, pedaled sustenuto. How perfectly those giant chimes heralded the night, spreading a pall on the air where I heard what I often felt in my heart—                how wide is the gulf

between speech and silence, how sad our thoughts, forever caught between. Now a shepherd appears with his goats, a patchwork of grays and browns that billows down the knoll, the bells on their necks resounding, bronze and brass, copper and tin clappers and cups, large as apples for rams, thimble-sized for kids, each with its own timbre and pitch.

Later, at the covered bazaar in Istanbul, at the weekly market in Tiré, I will try to buy the music, hefting and sorting bells by shape and size, but nothing will match these starbursts of sound, the echoing of this mountain- sized marimba, glitter spilling from a vial, rain plinking into hollow clay jars. . . .                The herd advances,

leapfrogging toward an ancient stone trough where they lower their heads to drink, damping the bells. When they raise them again, the accidental music resumes— a xylophone pelted by hail. It covers me completely, a blanket woven of thrums and spangles, glissando trills, the tinsel of tambourines and finger cymbals.                Sometimes when I sang

in choir, I felt the bones of my skull buzzing, music passing through them like drone strings, my own voice inaudible in the rainbow of sound we hung from the rafters. I had to hold hands with the girl beside me for the highest soprano riffs, I was so dizzy with the bliss of blending in completely.                Slaked, the caravan

retreats, dragging the sound behind it like a ninetails of soda cans and flatware lashed to a newlyweds' bumper. Then, like a siren dopplered by distance, the pitch drops and fades. I step forward, straining through the new silence for any whisper, but even their hooves fall like felt on the stone outcrops.                Years ago, I read

The Lives of the Romantic Poets and recall now their favorite toy and metaphor for the poet: the Aeolian harp, a kind of fretless guitar placed in a window where gusting breezes strummed a pensive music that came from nature, not art. Anyone, said Shelley, could coax the world to sing, as today the goats did,                exchanging

their breath and movement for that celestial glockenspiel, an alchemy profound as turning lead to gold. Far away, the goats run still, taking their music wherever they go. Shelley believed the poet is like the wind harp, and life the wind that plucks his harmonies, his poems.                Well I have lived in a punishing wind

for years now, but how many bells could I summon? Never enough for the century's slaughter. Not even enough to forge the iron of my own losses into a sounding shape. After the goats sang to me in my language, I asked myself how I could live without that sound, though later it faded. Later, I could not even remember their music                without this poem.