Letter to An Expatriate
Dear Greta
Like you, I arrived in Buenos Aires
in exile from a country
I could no longer call my own
Yours was a forced migration
Mine I fled by choice
Curious we would both find consolation in the black and white world
of photography?
I do not know how it started for you.
Being an outsider helped:
No one bothers to keep you out
if they never considered inviting you in
Were you married?
Did it cushion the strangeness to have someone who who understood?
Others who had to make their way in this
cosmopolitan closed city?
Multiplicity would have been second nature
Did it start as a game? Did you play it alone in the red light?
Who got the joke? Anyone?
When did you begin turning your gaze outward,
gathering the evidence, careful so that no one would ever suspect
with your gaze
you were fomenting revolution
plotting the overthrow of this borrowed country
You, a good citizen
negotiating a sly complicity
with this place
you called home.
