Emigration’s Endgame


On the recliner in her Waterloo den,
she senses Europe and

nothing has changed now for ever more,

nothing at all, though her language becomes English
and the books she reads track the foreign territory
of love swirling in an American drink.

In a Slovakian drink, she dances
with all the soldiers and all the prejudices
we now can’t acknowledge,

can’t believe are real,

those phantoms on the face of a changing moon
prowling a crippled night,
when the eye sees no land but homeland.

She accuses me of being the confused traveller
born, but fallen out of time, my soul
sinking into the quicksand heart of a Kitchener street,

foot heavy on the gas pedal
cruising a crumbled downtown,

dreaming of nothing
that ever existed in her here.