Amsterdam Song, New Year’s Day: 1994
"I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.
I want to be entered and picked clean.”--Charles Wright
Life still occasions
and beneath the sky, lives bike over the ice and the hills and the North Sea
bows and names it language, your bones’ ache and falling
this cold, winter day, as the new year clicks a door stop open.
How quietly we fall from the sky:
how like a heard of trains,
how like a broken face with a smile the belly of rain,
how like the shadows eyes cast on the coats of long and unlimbered limbs,
how like lovers who pen their flesh love letters with snow on their teeth,
how like the tales you shared with the War widow on the train running from Wierum
beach’s splayed hair,
how like the dying, firecrackers of gun burst, toward the cold mouth of Amsterdam,
how like the skin separated by fingers and excavated Victorian keys,
how like the sleep of grass, a song muscular over water,
how like the buildings swelled with guarded light and the patter of feet,
how like the ghosts of grammar haunting the morning with drunken forgetfulness.
How quietly we fall from the sky:
a white pebble on the bed of green leaves, left behind from a boot stumbling,
a blue lock dancing between a black bike over tin water, the rusted hearts gazing at
their mirrored shadow,
a half-moon of red lights arched and bridged over dreaming canals.
How quietly we fall from the sky.
Pick these things apart and feed them to others,
Softly,
And without breath.
Life still occasions the miraculous, our lives picked clean,
The Chronology of our meaning, spun.
Let us do the arithmetic.
Let us, spin.
