Amsterdam Song, New Year’s Day: 1994
"I can fold
all my belongings
and a dream
into my pocket
I will fold myself
into a seabird"--Holly Lee
Life still occasions long beneath the sky
lives bike over ice, hill and the North Sea
a widow’s story bows in the air
names language word
the grammar of young bones’ ache fall between seats
this cold winter’s day sticks to skin as breath as tongue to frozen windows
and a story plugs into the spine of a Dutch train’s seats
the phlegm of memory stirred with day-old vodka
as the new year clicks another door open
and the wind, the wind stops
before a teenager lost in the snow throws himself on the tracks, a false step
How quietly we fall from the sky
how like a heard of trains
how like a broken face in the smile of the belly of rain
how like the shadows eyes cast on coats on long and unlimbered limbs
how like lovers who pen their fleshy promises in texts of love,
snow on their teeth
how like the tales you shared with the War widow
wheels running from Wierum along the coast
how like the beach’s splayed hair
how like the dying firecrackers of gun burst toward the cold mouth of a tunnel
Amsterdam Centraal, 1884
how like the skin separated by fingers excavated Victorian keys
how like the sleep of grass, a song muscular over water
how like the buildings swelled with guarded light, the patter of tiny feet
how like the ghosts of grammar haunt the morning with forgetfulness
how like the drunken clock at the top of the stairs barking, barking undone
How quietly we fall through the grass
a white pebble on a bed of black leaves left behind from a boot stumbling
a bronze lock dancing between a yellow bike and cinder fence
tin water, rusted hearts gazing at their mirrored shadow
a half-moon of red lights arched and bridged over dreaming canals
the moon fell shy in the awkward night
How quietly we fall from sand to snow, my love
pick these things apart and feed them to others
softly
without breath
tables on the tongue shoes at our back
stories picked clean some forlorn chronology of meaning, spun
let us do the nameless arithmetic, let us undo the grief
how quietly we fall through the fields on a train
how quick the drop from words to well
a pebble dropped from a blank page
a bulb squirreled into the brown soil
the umber stains under nails will remember
let us fall then for once and not get up
this time let the sky get up in our place
as we spin the words in our thorax, together
how quietly we fold ourselves into dream
how quietly we sleep in the pockets of yellow flowers
how quiet the sky in the rain, as a train falls
as we fold ourself into seabirds once and for all
for: Holly Lee, in memoriam
