Open the great red drapes—three dozen brass rings
clattering on a brass rod above the picture window 
where I, nearly sixteen, wait in a splash of clothes 
on a plush, carved settee while the Berlin Wall
comes down, chunk by chunk, on the evening news. 
Here, radio towers and blast furnaces rust with the old
decade. Here, a young reflection, not yet mine, hangs 
with the television’s in this living room’s cold fixed view. 
But move my painted eyes. And the background loves me, 
it shrinks perfectly—sloping lawn, dry-brushed clouds, 
newly paved street’s vanishing point where night clots. 
Empty my imagination. And I do not dream 
outside our frame. Arrange me. And I am yours
while strangers pull each other through breaks in the Wall.