To visit my aunt’s home was to cross borders
where love and verve, at least, were not belongings
that were lost. I was an ex-pat among all of them,
since I didn’t have the language. And though English
was a coin that all (almost) were rich in,
someone would make change in Hungarian
mid-conversation and I’d lose the entire transaction.
It was like peering into the windows of an ancestral home
that appeared abandoned solely to me.

Every Christmas the roving players came in native dress
like tipsy presents themselves...guitar, violin,
concertina. They’d alternate, czardas and carol,
and taunt the rafters for being unable to hold the noise.
Everyone else followed the lyrics’ secret path
in that other tongue, and my uncle had Romanian
and some Italian to boot. I marooned myself
on the same speechless island and waited
to be towed from international waters
to somewhere closer to home.

A few years later I’d find strangeness not just
in czardas but carol too. The words of belief rang gorgeous
in the main but touched no cognates in my soul
that I could use to guess meaning. The Sunday house
where this happened grew more and more foreign
until I took flight. The voices at my back sounded joyful enough,
from that country I could no longer reach.