Impressions of two cities

Athena is a female entity -
a woman past her prime,
nourished by her memories
and vestiges of borrowed time.

She has known every female
calling since the world began:
goddess, priestess, courtesan,
slave, hetaera, concubine,
kore, matchmaker and bride,
refugee and martyr, whore, 
athlete, scholar, artisan,
unsung heroines galore…

Athena loves secluded courtyards,
doors that open onto doors,
although her world is drenched
in light, like sponge in brine,
limestone in sea, fruit in nectar,
pastries drowned in syrup,
oozing saccharine…

Her life has had its seamy side,
belied by buildings painted white,
the shrinking alabaster shrine
clinging to eroded heights.
Countless facelifts cannot fool
plebeians and Piraeus nights.
They scrutinise her sagging breasts
and lines that hedonism scores,
disguised by venerable rites and ancient lore.

Rosewater, cinnamon and raki,
bitter-orange blossom, jasmine,
rosemary, retsina, and church incense -
perfumes of Athena - olives, the Aegean,
coffee, cypresses and traffic fumes:
but she will make you want to dance
until you lose your mind…

Constantinople is as secretive
as Greece is ruled by light,
inscrutable and sinuously masculine,
despite the tide that courses through the Bosporus,
moon's crescent horns -
a place of inspissating night,
where men look on as women flirt
and coruscate with phantoms of the Ottomans.

Peripherally hovers the invidious seraglio;
a backward glance will still revive
stray spectres of Byzantium,
and should you wish to take Istanbul's pulse,
then enter the hamam, and let
your pores imbibe its ambience.

Salep vendors, carpet sellers, shoeshine men,
hamam attendants, fisherman and businessman,
the effigy of Ataturk, rub shoulders
with cologne dispensers, muezzin and pehlivan, 
hawkers, and the modern incarnations of austere viziers.

The city named for Constantine
is scented with aromas of a hundred kinds of tea,
dispersed as subtly fragrant wisps of steam;
mussels, lemons, charcoal fumes and octopus,
cologne and rose-oil, scumbled waters
where Black Sea and Marmara,
the freight of rivers,
eddy through the funnel of the Bosporus...
A melange of flavours flows
from barrows, lokantas, bazaars,
bamboozling the unaccustomed,
whose naive olfactory sense
they first entice and then disorient.

Istanbul is to inspissating night
as Athens is to light;
each city infiltrates the other's dreams,
pervades its consciousness.