The Girl Who'd Heard of Europe

The girl who'd heard of Europe
couldn’t think of anything she wanted more.
Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland,
the British Isles and Spain and Belgium,
little Liechtenstein and Luxembourg –
Portugal – and Austria – the Netherlands –
all swirled upon a spinning globe and bloomed
into a single whirling mesh of story:
whose mixed history was far too long and rich with glory
to ignore – steeped in colors you could not describe –
dimensions of a mystery too deep
to circumscribe with simple fact. She wanted more of that.

She quietly became emphatic
that she ought to sneak up to the attic –
scavenge there for clues: she sensed that something
in that magic darkness might just bring this thing to light.
She crept upstairs and there
discovered in its dusty drawers and boxes,
trunks and piles, a pair of red-striped shoes,
and quantities of loose discarded fabric –
including the surprise of what in shadow
looked as if it could have been a ruby-studded
scarf – the guise a complicated princess
might devise to steal into a complex night.

She wrapped herself in purples, greens and golds
and blues and sat there, in her layers, like
the emissary of an ancient kingdom,
on a black-and-white striped stool
and mused – glittering in dusk with tiny studs
and strands of costume jewels
someone had laid there for her, surely –
hoping she would put them on.
A European, surely, would come back to get them –
find her – want to take her with him –
and they’d scheme, and leave, together: travel
on a dream into a mystic European dawn.

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