Passport

You’re with your mother and me again, the sweetness
of your five years clinging to my legs
as we board a plane, though somehow you slip away
and I turn to look for you, frantic. But you, knowing more
and knowing better, smile from your window seat
without a window—ten rows back, next to strangers,
your shoulder flush against the blank, impenetrable hull
of this craft, this dream I don’t understand.

So I sit down too and we take off
                                                     but never leave the ground

                                        and I turn around
and cannot see you, cannot touch you, cannot make myself
understood to the other passengers, who speak
neither English nor the German you and I share.

Look at me, son! Give a sign! I shout
                        as I find nothing but flatness in the air
you once fleshed, nothing but my passport,
the one stamped “STATELESS,” the one whose only visa
is the snapshot you’ve slipped inside its back pages—

                            you, holding a copy of Guns & Ammo
over your face, nothing left of you
             but your thin brown fingers, a few black curls.