Exchange Student
Because I want to see myself,
I turn to one of the last pages and study the picture
of my wide eyes, baby teeth,
smile not unlike surprise. He’s mistaken
my birthday, I notice, but it’s not about me: it’s about Stalin,
dead six years only, and my father
an exchange student from Barnesville,
a town of only a handful of buildings, dirt roads.
It’s not about me but I am teaching
college students now, indoctrinating them,
he might say, and I want to be
there in Moscow, 1959, the trip
unique, mysterious, and exhilarating
for my father at the height of the Cold War, at twenty —
dinner in a spacious room with long tables, a bottle of vodka
for every two places and plain platters
of black bread, rich butter, and other dishes.
I want to forget that one time in 2009, for instance,
driving us to lunch — raise the jigger of vodka for toasts in Russian –
peace and friendship, peace to the world,
when he opened another beer in my backseat, repeat.
After his first bout of cancer,
I wrote poems imagining his death.
This memoir self-published:
Then on to Nuremberg. I am trying
now to write about his life, to make the past
as vivid as the present, ostomy bag, blood on the bathroom walls.
When the train crossed into West Germany through the fenced border
we cheered, sang God Bless America, showed our passports.
A poem is not unlike a passport
when you keep your borders fenced.
The underside of the train was searched.
Now he’s everywhere,
(big Government is the enemy of freedom)
moving again, gaining speed.
Out the window of the train he sees
women sweeping the shoulders of the highways with brooms.
Some things are impossible to clear. The year
is 1959. He keeps going until he reaches Le Havre, France,
then takes a ship back to New York. He has no memory
of the name of the ship, the transit, or the return home.
