OUT OF EDEN WALK

We left Baku in the time of the khazri — the cold north wind that blows bluely across the Caspian Sea in the winter. The cargo ship was the MV Fikret Emirov, named after an Azeri composer of the Soviet period. The night Caspian stretched the color of charcoal. The sea was five million and a half years old and it expanded and contracted through the ages with the changes in climate: a vast systole and diastole of dilute saltwater beating at the very edge of Asia, at the last rim of Europe. If not a heart — then an eye. A teary, black pupil gazing up at the Milky Way. The wind blew and the same three seagulls drafted on the superstructure all the way across, from the Caucasus to Central Asia. The birds reached a new subcontinent without hardly flicking a wing.