Oriana IvyTwenty years later I’m told I am foreign.
How naïve to have thought I’d grow out of it. As if I could erase that Columbus Day: in the morning I had a homeland; in the evening I had two suitcases. Twenty years later under desert sky, I remember the stencil of drizzle in Warsaw. On the sill of our old kitchen, pigeons ruffle like small gray clouds. My uncle and my father raise a toast with żubróvka, the buffalo vodka, the bottle lit with a blade of buffalo grass. I ought to remember in more vivid color, but I was carelessly young. I tried so hard: changed my name, ate only with my right hand -- eager to throw away extra vowels and hands. Twenty years later men still want me to touch them in French, slide toward them on slow Slavic looks: “You’re from the Old World -- You know how to treat a man.” I must be centuries old -- I am river and rain. And the half-remembered Warsaw parks, chapels of green dusk; through a fence of shadows I call after the long-lost child. Yet my true homeland is not lilac gardens, nor childhood’s palaces of clouds, but the undefeated republic of the mind. Among statues in a museum, no one says, as I used to, “Excuse me, I’m foreign.” No one is foreign. |