a mouth
opened to allow everything
oceanic in.
Gigha
Bring me a candle, Brown, and let me see this blood.
—February 3, 1820
A little swoon
by a lilac
and a screen
of Victorian trees, laurel
and yew
is given over
to his low fence,
the hedge of laurustinus
and China roses,
mulberry shade.
A paltry nightingale,
coughing words,
a dark-spotted
handkerchief:
“sitting and sobbing”
at the end
of Well Walk.
Words like
baleful and timbral seem to write themselves
on thick paper
he used for travel
notes, silhouettes,
coughing anguished
slang. Surgery
of the wind
squeaking
out his lung,
the one still
responding—
dark pendant,
eloquent membrane
exhaling candlelit
letters into the air.
Sky the romantic amber of postcards.
Glassed-in
tour boats churn the canals,
scouring sepia hotels
with glaring spotlights.
Then a houseboat for cats.
The captain, in my jet-lag dream,
confessed
to having had sex with a variety
of farm animals.
And that he’d enjoyed it.
They “did not talk back,”
just shit on the knees of his pants
and his hands.
Black-and-white chaos of a pigeon-feeding station.
Someone, near dark, near the back
of the tour boat, muttering, “Get the gun, Elmo.”
In several languages
the guide recalled the exact measure
of tanks and humiliation.
Sky a stupified ochre.
Dazed in the Rijksmuseum, drawn
deep into still lives.
Vermeer’s The Cook, the woman in placid blue pouring milk into a bowl, a window’s graded light falling on the white plate near her hands— her simple act miraculous. Paint
has become warmth I crave at dusk
in the rainy canals and shivery alleys of young junkies.
Reflected by lamplight—streetcars floating past,
houseboats and bicycles distorted on wavy mirrors—
everything’s a bluish-yellow, a powder
ground between two stones, a moon egg
cracked into it to make a paste
called Amsterdam, glazed at sunrise
because the dark has left in a flushed urgency.
I send you this postcard of the false
bookcase, third floor, 263 Prinsegracht, now
a museum, behind which, for eighteen months,
Anne Frank was hidden.
When I walked through it, schoolkids were clustered around
photographs of the camps, pointing and giggling.
Faces in cattle cars, grim buildings.
I wondered what colour
Anne’s eyes had been,
what hand she had written with.
I imagined her mother
pouring milk into a bowl
while some duteous banker granted a loan
to a man who had informed “the authorities”
about someone buying enough at the market
for two families.
It’s grown almost too dark to write.
In a few minutes I board the train to Ghent
where I’ll see van Eyck’s huge altar:
The Righteous Judges and Knights of Christ.
Everyone
