1 Pass
Jus sanguinis, law of blood
as if by transfusion
you lived on, involuntary vampire,
I carry
by former marriage a mantle
you never wanted –
Swiss Australian –
wherever you lived,
you did not belong,
were the black sheep,
scapegoat.
Is this what you
impart, what I
inherit?
2 Assisted Passage
Lobbed across continents
with a sweetheart on the SS Sydney
Come to Sunny Australia!
no word of English but
this is the house that Jack built
lodged in a Nissen hut,
set to cut
lengths of metal
for a suitcase company
in a country that didn’t rate
immigrant degrees,
making a new start.
3. Homeless
Later, when all fell apart:
off out of the
Marital Home and all alone,
cramming
into your Charger,
lairy car she called the death trap, dossing
on back seat, teacher now—my teacher
for a while there
though I didn’t know where
you were living
planning your classes and marking
on front seat,
washing in beachside blocks, moving on,
til when we met again
in my twenties
you’d holed up
in a caravan with just room enough to stretch out –
how could I not let you in?
4 Expired
Red compacts, marked
with a little white cross,
discarded,
old entities
in the bedside drawer:
am I still the bearer?
I own each particular.
Each unused Leave to Enter.
Acknowledge derivative status,
canton
where I was never born
and had never been,
cold northern town
of your first known ancestor
mine
by assertion –
a woman takes her husband’s
Place of Origin, in the Swiss system –
handed on, in this wise
to my children’s children,
with no Swiss ‘in’ them,
IDs accreting,
cancelling and slashed,
buried now among piles
of underwear,
sketches for a portrait, Wildean,
that cannot flatter;
the stages of breakdown.
How lightly I thought to cast it all off!
There’s this whole other apparatus
that wants to track me,
my representation,
that notes all my sins in the context
of civil status
and translates them.
5 Origins
Bülach, Bürgerort, is up near the border
almost off the map.
I’ve no real business here, revisiting,
kicking down streets I barely remember
and that never knew me.
You hadn’t been there either,
just learnt by rote the family lore:
Place of Origin means
if we are ever destitute, we claim
this right: they have to take us in.
You were always losing your foothold,
the very roof over your head,
your good
schoolmaster-father
Swiss-village pillar
somehow ruined,
so that when we toured
so many years later, you showed me
two childhood homes: Before and After.
Then on to the school for boys
who ‘sensed a vocation’, under the chill
watch of that Black Madonna,
her foot
kissed so often it had worn down
like a patient child,
bearing Einsiedeln,
place of the hermit,
alone in a crowd.
6 Absolved
You were vowed to the Lord
and enrolled
to spread his Word:
Missionshaus,
Maria-Enzersdorf, in Vienna.
Always Maria,
substitute mother.
When they expelled you
after many years
(you who’d been telling,
townsfolk Priests can’t really forgive your sins)
you went back to find your cell stripped
and reassigned.
For months you slept
in an attic, fed by a soft-hearted nun
who brought secret plates from the kitchen
that was trying to starve you out.
Did you think of Bülach then,
with nowhere to turn,
knowing that shame meant your parents’ door
was closed forever?
7 Outsider
The real Bülach is starkly quiet as
I scout around it,
looking for
nothing. I head across town
and a young man,
thinking me English, warns,
‘But Fraülein,
that is the Catholic church!’