POLAND

“I have always wanted to see Poland,” I tell Anna,
my new Polish friend with dyed red hair,
at the DUMBO gallery opening. True?
Suddenly, it is. Maybe Poland is lovely,
maybe I’m going to be happy.
I look for the trays with big cocktail wieners:
that’s definitely the Milwaukee in me.
Nothing seems steady now, everything’s shifting.
Glass buildings shoot up in Red Hook,
a crack slum until two minutes ago,
NYPD bomb dogs pace in the subways,
my new husband loves me — yikes.
How could I die if he loves me?
Despite five wieners, I’m still hungry.
Where is he? He said we’d go out for dinner.
The old fear: did he somehow leave without me?
“Warsaw is so European now,” Anna says,
“Cosmopolitan: no state TV, no machine guns,
no rotting potatoes, plus they’ve got meat.”
I think of Milwaukee – who wouldn’t?
I watched the Beverly Hillbillies after supper,
comforting twang; but the parents started to whisper
from the kitchen, bomb shelter blueprint on the table.
I heard “Warsaw Pact,” “Cold War” and “The Bomb.”
At school, jolted by air raid drill sirens,
huddled under my desk, crouched
in new black patent leather shoes, so slippery,
I wondered how I’d ever make it,
in the five minutes they said we would have
to run home.

ANICCA

When he vanished into the woods ahead of me
I leaned against an old pine; all I saw was dark-grey light
where he had been:

all I heard were leaves rustling where a moment before
and so many years before that

my first lover hiked before me in plaid work shirt, worn jeans,
carrying an ancient stick
every morning before daybreak, shepherd-collie mix trotting in front,

his feet crunching pine cones and dry twigs
as we walked to the meditation hall

and I hung back, watching to see if he would notice
I was no longer by his side,

while beyond us the dog barked, having passionately treed a squirrel.
There was something I wanted to say at the age of twenty,

a question I was unable to ask,
and so clearly seeing him walk before me

it lodged once more in my trembling throat, and the mystery was
not that he disappeared again,

but that red sky, then sunlight, so quickly took his place.

After Rosanna Warren

TO MY ELASTIC WAIST PANTS

Your generosity brings tears to my eyes.
I need breathing room, not like when the Germans needed
“breathing room” to invade Czechoslovakia — that was insane —
but happy breathing room, without the kind of interference
you get with zipper-front dress slacks, for example.
Even drawstring pants require too much fuss and intervention.
Wearing you, with your pliant rubberized waistband,
a non-invasive cotton blend expanding as I breathe out,
I feel understood, my round belly accepted and rumbling,
as if bubbling and fermenting with yeast and I remember
the time I tried to bake bread and closed every window,
turned up the thermostat in our house to 100 degrees
because I did not know how to activate yeast
and my father came home from work and laughed,
hard, so he had to hold onto the doorframe, saying,
“Shhh, let’s not tell your mother about this one.”
You, discreet polyester companion, remain silent and flexible.
I thank you for allowing me to just sit here cross-legged,
breathing, on the shore of Saranac Lake in the afternoon sun,
without having to explain myself to anyone.