Carpet Bazaar

Leave your shoes and cameras. Be absorbed in the bright magical patterns, as alive today as thirty centuries ago. Patterns within patterns. Motifs of trees and leaves repeated through the ages. Pink and yellow leaves of sycamore. Yellow willow blades and long brown pine needles in deep soft piles.

Pools of light radiate from the trees and an autumn sun choreographs a path as sun beams run along spider silk tightropes. By day walking among the carpets feeling the texture beneath my feet and passing the same place many times seeing more, the two sides to the leaves, two tones, two colours and how they dry curling upward and how more leaves are upside down. The smells change as one moves, transient subtle decays, exotic perfumes, the clamour of voices.

In those evenings I leave the bazaar, cross the Bosporus bridge to work the arc light for a dancer's performance, returning at night to sleep in a melon stall, behind the shutters in the pile of green melons.

Today is all wind and rain. The Sycamore leaves madly shake themselves to death, a dance of death as they brake free. Yesterday's yellow ash leaves like discarded fish bones are now only pale spines.

The 19th century rug is Persian with a Tree of Life pattern and made by the Baluch people.

http://www.persiancarpetguide.com/sw-asia/Rugs/Baluch/Guide_to_Baluch_Rugs.htm

http://www.rugs-oriental.net/persian-rugs.html

The rustling of the silk is discontinued,

Dust drifts over the courtyard,

There is no sound of foot-fall, and the leaves

Scurry into heaps and lie still,

And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them:

A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

Liu Ch’e by Ezra Pound (post-Cathay)