gleams in a movie,
its lights gems on the plush display
cloth of night, its bridges bracelets.
Yet the shabbiness of a glimpsed
street corner is what gets through, 
and mine reaches out from memory to me—
a speaker of its native language—
with this begrimed cornice,
this lintel, this rain- and sun-mottled awning
over the drugstore window, 
this black ash on the sill.

			As if,
were I to rush there, I could hold
in my hands their distilled atmosphere—	 
the way someone holds, in the cup
of her ear, a taped voice
achingly familiar. As if 
every place we've ever called home
does not flow away from us
on an unlooped conveyer—
like the waters of an infinity pool
vanishing over the zero edge. 
As if I wanted to reach down
on my chest for the key there 
six decades past, to unlock the square skates,
tighten them against my sneakers, lean in
and rumble over the cracked sidewalks flashing mica
from the drugstore to the park,
and glide on its paths and stop
at another corner, 
newsstand, candy store, barber shop—
utterly, beautifully, unremarkable.

—on finding my long dead mother's transit passport

Here she is:
plump in a high-sheen floral
blouse in the stamped picture, 
traveling through Schweiz
from Wien to Cherbourg,
towards that never-discussed passage
to New York. Haare: schwartz, 
wild as horses’ and as coarse, 
Augen: dunkel under the cloud
of her adolescent brow,
and glittery with angst I recognize.

It’s as if she’s back from a past
that had been masked by witness protection,
from the then
for which I have no other photo
and so few of her words (I barely
asked) —
from what she was
before naturalized my Mother, 
American Stella...

Stella, why did you never tell me
Sara was your given name? Or why
my grandparents—gone
before I was born—obtained
Quota Immigration Visa No. 464,
August 1, 1927?  Broken windows?
Cartoons with side-curls
and long noses? Did your family blanch
or scoff? 

Sara, did you sigh, relieved,
or did you weep from fear 
and grief as the train wound past
the peasant-postcard
meadows, past Wagnerian gaps
with alpen-rose and edelweiss-
splashed high crags, and you left Vienna
behind forever: the solemn
facades and statues,
the modest snug rooms across the canal
from the Stephanskirche (so cold
and grand), the neighbors
who smiled the Jewish child in
for Christmas cake? 

I will never know. Though I once saw
the tiny circle of park
near Zwei Ilgplatz (the address you never
forgot)—its soil blackened 
with dog turds, splattered
with greenly iridescent dog piss, 
so close to the frankincense and myrrh
of the confectioner's window,
the marzipan rabbits
and the shining Easter eggs.