Appointment in Wrocław

You travel beautifully.

Flight, escape, the fulfillment of a promise;

There is a world elsewhere and this is it.

You’re not depleted by the journey.

With every mile that disappears beneath your wings

You become more thrillingly yourself.

You step lightly from the plane

As from a refreshing shower.

You appraise the airport, pleasantly surprised

By its crisp decor and refreshing fragrance.

You appreciate the little things

They’ve done to make you welcome:

Lavender and white rose.

We chose a city neither of us knew;

We said we’d make it ours.

Nobody we know has ever been here -

And not because they chose to stay away.

We did our homework, vetted the place thoroughly

For any hint of cholera, terrorism

Or hostility to guests from overseas.

Everything we learned about the city

Stiffened our resolve to make it ours.

                             *

A city street, a rainy night. A night to be indoors.

The wind is more specific: A night to take refuge

From the wind - an observation that the wind

Might well have made a million times before;

The kind of thing Victor Borge might have said.

No matter where you thought you were

 - I saw his show in London and New York -

This was his city and he your genial host:

Welcome to Vienna... But this is not Vienna.

Because I’m always late

I arrive forty minutes early and kill time

By caving to a habitual conceit:

I’m in the wrong place.

I’m waiting on the wrong corner - and I know

From uncommunicable experience that a map

Will never help me relocate myself.

I used a map to choose our meeting place

Long before I had a chance to see this street

Or stand on this street corner, which seemed to me,

From studying the map, the perfect point of vantage

From which to see our city at its best:

To get to know its people at their best,

And learn its public ways, its secret life.

But now I’m here - if here is where I am -

This corner’s not the place I thought it was.

It doesn’t occupy a place of prominence

In any area that may be called

The Montparnasse of anywhere.

It’s not the sort of place where you can stand

Secure in the knowledge that where you are

Is where you always knew you’d be

When the time was right. The time is right

But these are not the people I was promised:

The auspicious, shining spirits who assembled

At a brilliant corner of my mind -

So similar in so many, many ways

To this unwholesome, half-deserted place

That the resemblance is, to say the least, uncanny -

Knew the sympathetic magic that drew us here

And would recognise, I’m sure,

The desperate inertia that keeps me here

And bids me in the stern voice of destiny,

Be still and wait.