The Surveyors: Poems

IYieldThat’s what the sign saidbelow my window.I’d step out of bedto look down on the forkthe y had madein the word and the road.yield was destinedfor a field of yellow,but scrambled like eggsinto something like daily.Was firm, was an order,but just meant consider.And consider I did.I stared at the signthat was so little needed:to stay or to go?That was for others,my parents, to know.He might leave someday.She might stay behind.I was only one sideof the triangle.I’d slip back in bed,back into my own mind,and more letters wantingto play came to mealone to untangle.BratislavaSo I’m still alive and now I’m in Bratislava.That’s funny. I hadn’t expected to be alive.A sign in italics nudges us at the station:Have an amazing time in Bratislava!That’s funny: a straight-faced wish, offered in Englishand then Slovakian, posted above a trash canthat stands like the only monument in town.We’ve heard there’s a castle, though. We need a tram.We take one, and it heads in the wrong direction.A pretty girl, cheerful and blond, straightens us out,and we get on and off a bus at the proper stops.That’s funny. Already a right place and a wrong oneto be in Bratislava, and I am amongthe people who sort of get this, at least at the momentI happen to occupy, within a vacationin Vienna with a day trip to Bratislava.That’s funny. I’d assumed my travel companionthrough life would be my husband, even if I’d gone to Bratislava, which I hadn’t thought oflong enough to think I would or wouldn’t.The spanking white castle, standing high on a hillwe climb on foot, swigging our bottles of Coke,dates to the year 800 or so, but burneddown to the ground, which tends, as we know, to happen,and was reconceived in one of the worst times of all,the 1950s, under Soviet rule.That’s funny. Atop embarrassing pillars, knightsin plaster armor gaze up at the skytriumphantly, although what for is forgotten,and the sunlight they eclipse in silhouetteis all the sillier on those phallic cannonsbetween their legs, with three or four cannonballs.More cannonballs per man. That’s human historyin a nutshell. Bullies unsated with all they’ve gotand below, the blindsided masses. That’s what it is.And yet I’m happy, now, with my companion—he likes me, I like him. He has his own backstoryof bleak encampments, battles lost, and sorrowsbest not spoken of in Bratislavalest we spoil our day, which so far is duly amazing.I admire his dignity. Dignity is funny.Everything’s funny now, which we hadn’t expectedto happen, either of us, after what happened.We’re still alive and now we’re in Bratislava.Pastry LevelI was gazing out backat the lemon-goldsun on the cream-colored painted brickof the new house.(New again, I mean.I’ve told you the story—that it was finished just a fewmonths shy of the war;that young families moved in and out before a widow who couldn’t care for it anymoresigned it over to me,a single buyer latelypossessed by self-possession.) This morningat my writing table, lookingoutward for a word,in that sun-glaze on the wallI saw again a baker’s shelftwenty years ago in Paris.You were there, of course.The average Americanfour-year-old girlstands at forty inches tall,if you can get her to stand still.When you were four,in those ruffled French dressesI couldn’t help spendinga fortune on,you couldn’t be kept awayfrom patisserieafter patisserie;you guided me by the handto every window displaythat we might inspect another batch of little pleated tartes au citron,glistening neatlyat the level of your eye.Remember whenyou, your sister, your father and Iall spoke the same language?Because of youwe invented a phrase—“pastry level”—to indicate the height of any four-year-old on the street . . .It seemed to go without sayingwe’d be strolling togetherall the rest of our days.