Amsterdam

Amsterdam isn’t a bad puzzle of a city.
All the parts seem to fit, the water and the sky
alike bright blue or filtered silver
and the tall skinny houses
bowed over the water, as if to see themselves,
but really to make room for pianos on hoists
and huge wooden cupboards, too broad
and high for the puzzle doors punctuating
storybook facades. The wonder
is how the tallest of Europe’s citizens,
the most upright, fit through.
Or slip down the narrow canalside landing
behind each house, to the slender boats
that fill the water grid, like fish in Eden,
all types and sizes, fearless, although
everyone knows the sea’s power,
held back for now.

Through the mirror of travel
the room becomes subtly different.
Reverse-handedness is the magic,
is all it takes, and there blooms
a world in which it is interesting
to imagine living. In which
Everything fits, tulips and marijuana
and stronger stuff; pissing statues,
whores of all descriptions, some in windows
and some in back rooms without their passports.
Anne Frank’s chestnut, secretly rotted,
was taken down by wind, and headlines linked
its felling to the rise of Holocaust denial,
but rotting—
trees above water and below water the piers
of charming nestled dwellings—
is what time does. And from her window too
the world spreads its beauty like a picnic
on a bright cloth, for an afternoon.

With David at the Green Mill (Patricia Barber Quartet 2/2010)

I think I remember it all—
Winter, late night; salted sidewalks?
Wind and snow pushed past us through the door
right up to the man taking the money.
He winced. He had a barroom face
in the windows’ greenish glow.
We moved through darkness past darker heads,
low chatter, brushing shoulders;
bodies pressed together in the narrow room.
That table at the front was luck!
You sat back to the band, admired
the tatty glamor,
the painted plaster caryatids,
and the hint
of old tobacco in the boozy air.

When the set started something electric
squealed and was silenced. I remember
her arms lifted; her long fingers
glowed
with the rose of blood
lit from within and gilded
by the light from the bar
where ranks of bottles and
varnished mahogany
swam in the long mirrors.
Yes, her arms lifted and without hurry
moved through silence; her fingers
were articulated embers, flinging sparks.

She played, she sang; would you say,
the voice was smoke or silk?
A river unrolling itself, surprising itself?
The bass thrummed
and the drums whispered
suggestion and the guitar
picked up a tangent
and it moved among them
rocking to and fro,
leaping and leaning together across wide water,
limb following limb and reassembling,
momentum a pure good gift.
Their smiles met in the dark.

The crowd sat sighing, and swaying.
We shared that amber orbit—
we could not stop
grinning and tapping the table top.
You said it made you want to play again.

Two weeks later you slipped
to the bathroom floor, and away
from every sound
from every sort of light,
beyond the reach those
unimaginably many reflecting surfaces
beyond the blackest black.

I’ll save it as long as I can,
ripples wide and wider in the beaten air
and we together in the circle.
It doesn’t quite mesh. I try.
Now I have to get back
to what I am doing.
And the glittering sand
slips through the narrow glass
to build a shining mountain and bring it down.