Hot Oil

	The beignets soak in hot oil at the end of a squeeze of mazed street with its alabaster women and tiled fountains behind iron-shuttered walls as high and thick as six centuries of marauders could make them; shut up in non-existent oyster dishes fitted with the precious dust of rhino horn and longings that Cavafy would have given his last inkwell to merely glimpse. Burton, where were you when I required a tour of the brothels of the Argentine? It's a long way from Mecca, my friend, from the pharos of Alexandria searching the seas for plunder like a Flinder's bar bending North to its own true direction home to layers of inlayed rosette, indulgence floating in a hot bath of boiling fat, two-to-go, down the alley of spices, cargoes from Samarkand, spilt nostrums in a labyrinth drunk on its own dark twists of bent ships caulked and clotted with cinnamon dust rusting in the harbor waiting month after month for new orders from a desert preoccupied with the beheadings of infidels before the open wound of palace gates where deep 12th century troughs with beveled rails do not prevent the distracting spatter of blood over the hardened grease of Moroccan doughnuts, too late for more than a moment's glimpse; bare ankle under formless layers of Braille-cloth betrayed by the glint of sunlight on forbidden gold chain as she plunges into the endless tunnels beneath a Byzantine Empire and vanishes forever.

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