Albrecht Dürer and me Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 –
    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
    Crankshaw’s
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 ‘suspicious, misanthropic’
    doomed Archduke Franz Ferdinand) in Vienna’s
    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
    she’s returning a kindness for mentioning her spouse
    whom she left at dawn, knowing then his time zone
    was not just Sarajevo’s 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 woman’s 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 he’s 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 it’s 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