Parable of an Old Country

It is nighttime in Budapest.  The plates under
the land are moving again.  We wrinkle
down the face of Fisherman’s Bastion
where the tourist crowd, one long lens,
points toward the Danube and the bank
beyond.  At night, the riverboats wheel
west toward Vienna or against the current,
Sulina and the Black Sea.  They are tiny
shoes under the moon-tealed flow.  On my
new desk you lined up my muse elephants
like  clay Rockettes, at whose end you sat
the Ohio buckeye I carried in my pocket
for the last four years.  It seems as unusual
here as I do.  Sometimes I feel I have nothing
left to say.  Sometimes my heart panics,
an outdated translation, and your foreign
words are the only words that will do.
The past is the old country for everyone.

Jessica M. Jewell