rooms
their hush, no one exclaiming over a doodad
found in a shop, held, tossed and finally bought
with money of a different colour from the kind
now in your wallet, and no one to step inside
the circle of your arms, someone who easily
holds you back from drifting into a trance
whose edges are sharper than the sound of
your key turning in the door, your nose
taking in days not spent here and where
you need to return, first by opening
windows and then by unzipping luggage
and letting their ghosts escape to haunt you
momentarily until you shower and sleep
dream raggedly, incomprehensibly the same
as you dreamt in far places where you went
to become someone other than yourself, a
surprisingly easy enough adventure you might
someday repeat once home has become again
the place you love enough to leave behind
its comforts growing around you until you
fling them back into dusty corners and
light out to where your eye gets fed on
a stone bridge, view of a lake, streets full
of strangers walking past, not seeing you â
the one you might attempt in that new air
2. return: young woman from Sarajevo
seatmate on the flight home has
rumpled hair back of her head, as do
all of us who travel on the long-sleep haul
our bodies struggling gracelessly with so much
stimulation, and we talk very little, too aware
of need for conserving energy in ourselves
but I glimpse her passport with its harsh American
eagle and note the way she smiles when I open
Crankshawâs
The Fall of the House of Habsburg
and so I learn her husband is Bosnian and
will be travelling later from his homeland to join her
in Sioux Falls (a city I struggle to fix to a state)
and I think briefly of speaking of my surprise
at seeing fresh flowers on the coffin of Emperor
Franz Joseph (uncle to âsuspicious, misanthropicâ
doomed Archduke Franz Ferdinand) in Viennaâs
underground
Kapuzinergruft
, but restrain my questions
and when we stand later in the aisle after landing
both eager to breathe new air, I say her husband
will be asleep by now, past midnight his time
while we flew on through endless light
she wishes me good luck and touches the back of
my hand where it rests on top of a seat, a sincere
gesture but also one hinting I might need help
crossing nearly half the globe today, or perhaps
sheâs returning a kindness for mentioning her spouse
whom she left at dawn, knowing then his time zone
was not just Sarajevoâs with its honours
of horrors and beauty but also that realm
everyone occasionally, reluctantly leaves
3. return: arriving from Munich
in Chicago I am told the truth:
I have missed my connecting flight
thereafter, chaos: waves of travellers
their carts and suitcases merging, bewildered
by fat, black womanâs tone of command
â for what had they done wrong but land
in ord , stunned by physical onslaught
of chasing the sun, and the monitor tells all
to each of us whether bound for Omaha, Orlando
or Kansas City or not, shining blue and white
in tiny type, a wall no one goes to, fearing to cross
the line troglodytic men make as they flip
monster suitcases onto conveyor belts
their beer bellies in no way diminishing
their strength, taking my personal misfortune
as a given, not worth talking about
and baby held ahead of me begins to cry
her mother in head scarf, her father unremarkable
except that heâs leading them into
a new life, in Dallas, that name in history
they cannot really claim as theirs though today
we have all seen guns at passport control
that make us long for homelands temporarily
unattainable, or already left behind
4. return: oval window
a portal like no other
looks down into forest-top
clouds puffy or matte grey
constant sword-length
cutting across, wobbling
so itâs wise to fall away
from thrum of the actual, dome
blue-black above, the sickening tilt
and see instead remembered swifts squeaking
wheeling over parapets of