Identity

In the dimly lit music hall 

I fell in love 

with your eye sockets

because they were like mine

and for the first time

at the age of nineteen

I saw how I could be beautiful. 

Now you are a collector of songs

a professor of ethnomusicology 

but when we were young

punk kids out for a concert

your tenor voice

crept under my skin 

and opened the world up

for me. 

Maybe we are much richer now

inscribed with many 

pages of knowledge 

and still our dark eyes stare 

and our cheekbones 

sit in our faces 

the gift of some

Magyar ancestor.