At dinner with friends, someone dropped
an anecdote of his grandfather's
about "the one black man
in Warsaw," and managed to quietly derail
my mind from all other conversation.

I sped along like a runaway train
suddenly bound for the past,
and before I could stop myself
I was there. With my simple tweed luggage
and carefully chosen hat, I made my way
out of the steam of the locomotive
and into the mists of Poland.

The thickness of Eastern Europe
gathered in my lungs, and with each
breath, emboldened me to speak
a language I did not know.

I took an apartment in the poor section,
learned to make myself latkes and borscht,
while I waited to find this man. The landlady
had a flower shop, and I passed me time
with her cutting stems
in silence, wondering: "what had driven him
here, alone, into ultimate conspicuity?
Was he running, ashamed, from some
passionate crime? Had his wife and children
died in a terrible accident and could he no longer
bear the sight of his native land?"

As I left the shop I thought maybe he was just
a genetic anomaly, a black child born to white
parents, who had long since passed. The sort of
quirk of nature who's scientific explanation
is far more real, and far less interesting, than gossip.

There, while I walked down the stone street deep in thought,
an old man looked purposefully into my eyes, lifted his cap,
and said "czesc".