Watch closely, you’ll glimpse him:
—nights, lodged in a two-star
downtown German hotel,
a black silhouette by a third-
floor window, hushed eavesdropper
as drunks, haggling prostitutes
bark phrases of shattered glass
—hungry, holed at the local
Burger King, scoping faces, tasting
a sameness that’s not quite right
—mornings, a not-quite-moth
anonymous dress-green figure
backed to a wall, he waits to catch
Strassenbahn shuttle to drab-olive
military necessities, barracks,
commissary, PX, fence-barbed
mimicries of longed-for homes.
—So for ten days. The tenth,
drifting nowhere, he spots a flyer
reciting May’s upcoming theater,
reads, “Sonntag: Lohengrin,
Romantisches Oper…” Not once,
except in his mind, has he seen
an opera.
The theater, like mind,
holds crosshatching voices, a stage
a mauve curtain’s ripples hide.
The gowned, spangled, elderly Duchess
he sits by, an ornate relic of
outdated assumptions, wears a smile
for everyone, language even he
converses in. Soon, the sprinkly
patter, his program’s white pages,
lamps overhead, dim. Faces turn
instinctively to the orchestra’s calm gold.
Applause. The Prelude.
Cool, boreal-
blue strings—a cloudless A-major—
waft the unattainable Grail’s
devolving, enveloping grace
where he sits. As the floodlit knight
walks into the chiaroscuro of
tragedy, sings farewell and greeting
to the magical swan that strands him
in the world, as a bride weds
an unaskable question, with Kaiser
and soldiery, dovelike nuns, he, too,
senses a recognition, poignant
as in his dreams of returning
home, in the mind-dark theater,
in a country where nothing relates
to the mind he brings…
…No, wait.
Sidelong (he doesn’t turn) he glimpses
the Duchess, furtively, dabbing tears
under her spectacles. Then, as quickly,
she adjusts her shawl, straightens,
recovers poise. To flaring brasses,
as jubilant choruses bless
the wedded pair, she looks ahead.
They both do. Seconds, no more,
of a moment they shared, forever
incommunicable, yet shared over
an unbridgeable gulf, bridging it,
bear him ashore.
As wedding march
turns dirge, curtain and orchestra
close on the departing miracle,
he feels himself, finally, a part.
The oneness of what’s imagined
comes true, disclosing kinships
in a country where nothing’s akin
to the ties he left, realization
he carries to his hotel, intact
in next day’s streetcar’s confluent
faces—expressions doused,
ablaze, jaded, earthy, airborne,
like anywhere’s—one humanity
bearing daily a distressed ideal
to its accustomed homes.
