IX.
Daddy called me tsiganka
when I began to wander
restlessly the world.
Just like your grandmother, he’d say
and touch my hair
(the Kushner hair)
and kiss my forehead
(where the priest had once left ash)
as if to mark me:
you will never be afraid
to not stand still;
as if to bless me
where I stood,
where I would stand:
you will not kneel
XVI.
All night crossing the Tatra,
Krakow to Budapest, the train
only three cars long—
where is my friend?
Ken, who calls me Regina Cecylia,
Queen of the Gypsies, Carpathia.
We’ve traveled together from Berlin
but now the dining car between our cars
is locked, I can’t get through.
In these couchettes, only myself,
one other woman, her small son
and the porter who’s taken my ticket,
refuses in Polish to give it back.
Lie down then, let this pass—
the window a square of black glass
in which bare trees, fields appear.
A forest where I could be left,
this car uncoupled—who would know?
(500,000 gypsies burned
in the crematoria)
At each border (which country now?)
a clapboard shack with its plume of smoke
and the guards in their high boots,
their stink of cigar, who throw back
the door of my compartment,
flash on the lights, demand documents.
What if I had no passport, no papers
to prove I’m American?
What if I had been born
in the tiny village my grandmother fled?
What if I had no country—
would I be no one, then, to them?
Would they drag me into the woods,
would the quiet woman hold her child
a little closer, cover his ears?
Sleeping and waking and sleeping again,
disappearing into the dream, waking
into the dream of Budapest.
It’s snowing so softly the golden domes
above the city seem to float.
The porter has left hot coffee, a roll,
my ticket, crumpled, on the tray.
I jump off the train with my suitcase
into the station’s soot and din.
Gypsies are everywhere, flocks of them:
dark men in ragged coats who wave
their arms like sorcerers,
calling in voices of blood and crow,
Taxi! Taxi! Room!
I’ve read that, in caverns under these stations
—Sofia, Bucharest, Budapest—
gypsy children live on glue,
pimped for candy, for cigarettes.
But no children greet me here;
only these men I refuse and refuse
and my friend who is rushing toward me
down the crowded platform now,
silently, given back,
my name in his throat like a jewel.
XXI.
We were going by train we were going by plane we were going by ship by bicycle. We were going on foot we were going in rain we were going by bridge by car alone. We were always the same strange woman with our one black suitcase packed. We were moving in some kind of subtle direction on a smudged map, dark with crows. But without compass schedule plans we were losing everything we passed. We were throwing happiness with both hands to the wind like ragged clothes. We looked into the mirror of the road for signs of god. We were searching for the underground of everywhere at once. We were often photographed. We were never captured. Not for long. We were going where the suffering was best to suffer more. And where the joy was blinding, too. We were wearing veils beneath our veils. We were lapping up the world and rushing through it in our sleep. We were multiple as stars as grass the ghostly barren trees. We were a single moving shape: shadow and flesh, the shape between. I thought I saw you once over my shoulder, felt you breathe. Someone was panting down the tracks. I ran and ran. Our arms were wings.
Originally published in Cider Press Review, Volume 1.
