The Ghost-Child's Chimera
I used to think I was someone, but
I'm no one.
I do not exist.
I never was.
I am not the granddaughter of Yurik,
not the progeny of some tenacious teen smuggled out of Lviv,
a.k.a. Lwów,
a.k.a. Lvov.
Sent to a Brave New World:
Before his home morphed into a moat in the
tug-of-war
between Schörner's Wehrmacht and the Reds.
Before everything was devoured by the
gut-of-war
in pre-perestroika peristalsis.
Before Plan Zachód headed south,
and he headed
west.
Alas, poor Yurik, I knew you well:
In my specter's reverie, in a phantasmic delusion
Where you made
it to welcoming New York shores,
Where you received salutations instead of renunciations.
Where you felt your cheeks burn in an American kindergarten
class,
Where you pretended you weren't an adolescent swapping out Slavic
for Greenwich Willage slang,
Where you eventually rose up the ranks to your rightful
post.
Where you enlisted in the US Army and entered stage left into
the China-India-Burma Theater,
Where you smoked horseshit and dreamt of your old home, but also
of your new one.
Where, when you anchored back in the Hudson's maw, you danced
the Hopak and closed down McSorley's before stumbling down 7th
into morning Mass at St. George's.
Where you fell in love and kept on living, though not in
Lvov,
a.k.a. Lwów,
a.k.a. Lviv.
Where you became a woodworker and worked as you would.
Where you shepherded five children to the Unisphere of the
World's Fair, on the other side of the world from where you were born.
Where you smoked not horseshit, but tobacco, in the bent
billiards and Dublins that your smart-ass American-born kids occasionally crammed with
weed.
Where you still sipped wodka and wisited your parents in the Willage,
Where you paid your taxes,
Where you gave your grandkids Dorothy Hamill haircuts in
your cellar woodshop and caravanned some of them to Kerhonkson to learn what it
was like to be from
Lviv.
Where you died on an island far from your origin story,
proud to be an American, eating forbidden kielbasa to the very end.
But there were no salutations, only renunciations.
You became a bolus—the Euro-intestines got their fill.
Another St. Louis sent back to the motherland, or whoever would take them.
Those were all just my dreams—a ghost-child's chimera.
I used to think that I was someone, but
I'm no one.
I do not exist.
I never was.
Tweets and treats at @jenngidman.
