One the foreign woman
More than my life’s map
of notebooks and lost gloves
I know the moon’s other look.
I remember a hat rolling
and rolling. No name
no other detail swings
in that street’s wind.
Counting the steps to my room
in the damp house I glimpse
the fence and the roof
of my grandfather’s house.
Here I continually
open a drawer on the dust
trapped under newspaper.
I look through the glass
at an indifferent skyline.
I count the steps
in a strange house.
Two the return
Objects, clenched in their
separateness. Streetnames,
a park, the Jewish memorial.
In a place changed
out of my presence I find
known friends in strangers.
Dead streets, dead houses,
dead people. Here I walk
with my eyes turned away
not to see absences, blind windows.
Three the photograph
Face of Kafka, the camera
flattened old shadows that moved
in the eyes and mouthcorners.
How much of our lives is filed
in deep drawers, a red form
for my birth, a black for my death.
Documents, passports, the
European darkness is trapped
in the breath of officials –
jobs to do, quotas to fill.
As we learned when the shoes
were fetched up and counted
and the long graves were dug.
Out of that darkness ashes
and letters and photographs.
Stopped in a fragment
the shutter admitted
the curious look of a man.
The smile and the angle
of sunlight survive him.