Anne Frank's Wall

On to the wall,
pale brown paper
covering the borrowed plaster,
she pasted with the
brush and bottle
they sneaked to her,
carefully clipped images
from contraband
Hollywood monthlies:
Ginger Rogers grinning
from her lot-built equator,
Ray Milland’s dark gloss
wreathed in ethereal cigarette,
England’s royal princesses
in frills on lawns,
and Deanna Durbin full of sound
and apprehensive thrill –
What did that thin little girl
hiding
in that thin little house
up those thin stairs
feel
as she would unscrew the cap,
dip, and press firm,
smoothing the air bubbles
from her pasted-up gallery –
the acrid bite of the
glue’s aroma
wafting above her head like
Ray’s smoky tendrils,
and with Ginger,
thousands of miles away,
going through her steps
one more time,
knowing nothing of the brown paper wall,
carefully tended,
somewhere in that wide land
behind a narrow Dutch bookshelf?