Tourist
Warsaw, October: rose-madder by four,
the soldierly grey boulevards slippery
with tickets to winter. After forty years rebuilding,
the Old Town is like this beautiful girl I knew
whose face was wheel-broken in a crash,
and remade so well it was hard to say how
she looked wrong. I’ d brought two questions here —
holding them as if they might slip: who were
my mother’ s people? Where did they die?
In an attic-archive — deep card indexes, ink turned lilac