In those days, every corridor stank of boiled cabbage,

every elevator of piss. I once crossed the Polish border on foot

into Ukraine with a red-haired friend. She gestured extravagantly

at the chain-link fence, the barbed wire, the burnt-out kiosks,

exclaiming, “Welcome to the east!” In Lviv, we rented a room

where we watched a half-finished cigarette roll out from under

the makeshift bed. The woman counting our money shrugged,

“You can smoke it, if you want.” There were children’s toys

nailed to the walls, a crystal chandelier, a rust-stained bathtub

in the kitchenette, a toilet that didn’t flush. The door opened

onto a crumbling courtyard crisscrossed with laundry lines.

The whole city was crumbling, then. But that night, I switched

off the light in the room and the light from the courtyard spilled

through the stained-glass transom over the door, throwing prisms

of red and gold and blue like broken jewels against the walls.

We lay awake, head to foot, in that splendor, our passports

clutched to our chests. And, Irena, when morning came, at last,

the east lay before us, and history — stinking forever of piss

and ash, of ruin, war after war  — held its breath a moment, for once,

and we stepped out into the leafy streets of Lviv, your hair aflame.

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