Under the Shadow of Ararat

We always remember where we were when the call came.

In the updated Jeep Stories, I mentioned that I received a phone call informing me of my cousin’s plane crash. I was in an exclave of Azerbaijan, called Naxchivan, “The Land of Noah,” that is located south of Turkey and Armenia, and Mt Ararat looms massively on the horizon. It was a bleak November morning and I was scheduled to meet the Speaker of Parliament, a sort of governor of the small, landlocked territory bordered on the north by Armenia, with whom Azerbaijan is locked in a cold war that flares up from time to time over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory.

I was chief of party for the only international nongovernmental organization that worked in Naxchivan, and because of its isolation, air travel was the only practical way of getting there, but something about the region always left me unsettled.

On that morning in Naxchivan, before a meeting with the Speaker of Parliament, I answered a call I didn’t want to hear. It was the start of the Jeep story and the loss of a beloved cousin we always thought was unbreakable..

The phone rang
until I turned it off;
no phone had leave
to take from me
my one piece of comfort, silence,
on a day so grim
I stared comfortless
at the cold gray winter morning from a dirty window
on the fourth floor.

On the fourth floor,
I called you
while I stared blindly across the ruins of an unhappy city
sleeping below the snows
of an immense white mountain
that floated above all things.
It had no beauty;
only raw and sullen vastness.

The rawness and the sullenness held my eye when you answered
and I heard in your voice tones of grief
so fresh and bleeding
they cut through me and laid in my gut an immense weight, the tones of grief in your voice so terrible and crushing
there are no words.

Words.
I stared out the window and tried to find words. but I found only a view
of an immense white mountain
that floated over a ruined city
and a grief for which no words exist.