Bronzed by science, as makeshift as an exile’s adopted cradle,
with the belly laugh and striptease, of dogma casually put on
and lightly taken off again. Fanatic and comic by turn,
a little émigré resentment seeps from the end of the dinner table
with each new burst of grandchildren’s slang.
We left Europa for this?
A catchphrase no one even bothers to notice, not after
the thousandth time, dropped into those silent lulls much favored
by random comments and cranky disjecta.
Somewhere a memory sits and waits, valise at its feet
and net bag of onions at its side,
on a station platform long overgrown with weeds.
On a plain that is not Austrian, nor Polish, nor Soviet, nor Ukrainian,
but merely another allotment in the Grand Duchy of Loss,
the Republic of Vanished Things.