11 Warsaw
- My room … was a small room
- on the top floor of the old building
- of the American International School in Warsaw, Poland,
- which stood across the street
- from the American Embassy itself
- though never the target
- of the stone-throwing, window-smashing, government-sponsored
- demonstrations against the U.S. forces in Vietnam.
-
- No, where we children were, it was still quiet.
- And I remember that every school day,
- in the study period after lunch,
- I’d climb the 5 flights of stairs
- to this room, which was furnished
- with a desk : a chair : a broom : & a blackboard.
-
- All I remember accomplishing there
- was the creation of unpronounceable words
- — made of lowercase
- X, Y, Z, G, B, & the like —
- & of sketches of my anti-solar system,
- in which time ran backwards
- & rain fell up.
-
- * * *
-
- The other details of that room are lost to me now…
- —& in their place
- I find a more disturbing memory, from the following year,
- when our old school building was condemned,
- & we were abruptly moved to the only immediately available space
- in the city of Warsaw proper:
- the former Gestapo headquarters,
- just opposite what was once the round-up point
- for Jews collected from the Warsaw ghetto.
-
- There were stray bullet holes, still ,
- in the façade of that building —for in 1967
-
- — that charged year—psychedelic to the west,
- napalm-bright to the southeast,
- but still grey … grey …
- grey and black, where I was –
-
- in 1967 Warsaw was still not completely rebuilt,
- & certainly not completely re-plastered & repainted.
-
- But all that’s only the backdrop
- to the memory intruding here,
- which is this:
-
- Of wearing to school for the first time
- a pair of brand-new black-leather pull-on shoes,
- just received on my 11th birthday —
- or more precisely:
- the staccato tapping of my heels
- in the empty corridor down which I caught myself
- marching .