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.