In the Balance
      a painting by Edita Pollaková, Theresienstadt


Not pencil—watercolor! And it’s her turn
to sit at the rough table between the bunks,
to be enfolded, borne along
by the woman’s voice, “a house.

The essence, a few strokes . . .” What is
a house? This, the girls’ barracks
in Terezín, or the farmhouse
they left that night near Branov?

Not or— a swath of yellow,
long under the red tile
slanting roof, then a shadowed
wall to make it solid, “safe
as houses,” they say in England.

The base of the house is wanting.
She soaks her brush with brown
and paints the line over again,
a stroke that continues
past the building to become

the vein that feeds a leaf, a mere
translucent green ellipse, which the house
stands on, is joined to,

erected ark to impossible leaf, poised
on a wash of sky—
no ground—

only the earthdark veins
she forces through the nearly not there
(verboten)
leaf that holds the house in air.