I.
I descend to the street with the afternoon’s step
when every movement is promise
and every turn or surprising halt
a prompt for the day to come.
I could have crossed my legs in an allotment
avoiding the juice of purple peaches
ripening at night.
I am planning my visit:
I will reserve under a pseudonym
so to enter with a giggle
hugging you one by one.
Rudi will host me in his attic,
a kiss from the tender Russian
and her vehicle on loan,
(no doubt she will restate
how to twist and tie steel).
The wind arrives sculpted in space.
In that sector crevices start with K,
we like sneaking where inaccessibile consonants
are still imposed on foreign hopes.
We will seize the chance to sink some stripes
my rolled shirt-sleeves, you with the aches
of who ages in kitchens and is tint
by waste oil, dismissed from the dawns.
At some point Richard de Groot will arrive
(nom de plume)
And we will begin to breathe
as in a Sunday’s bachelors’ dinner
bringing out benches,
watching people pass by.
I too will celebrate the king,
shoulders wedged between a chemical toilet
and the wall.
I will sit at De Druif
checking the white corner
for elephants’ flesh.
Now is the age to smile –
I measured my first twentys
pressing “stop” on the bustling
voices of thrushes.
You will submerge stems of mint in boiling water,
but I will not discuss the dismissed paper,
at the post office a timid posture is always required.
Of your rivulets I am the sentinel
scrupulous observer of the night,
at every step direct my attention
to the pedals between arteries,
leave me a whole decade alone,
doing nothing but staring, agape, –
I still don’t get
the fucking pattern of these stairs.–
I will exult, reward me!
I want board, a terrace
overlooking Plantage and mornings off
until when due to love
I will be forced to stand straight again.
We are tired. Nobly we desert
the scaffolding of no longer concern.
Giardini Margherita, April 13th
II.
Why do those filthy hands move me?
Perhaps because as a child I fell in vinyl glue
at school and today I carry the dust
one breathes in the room and only sees
in backlight in the afternoon,
when rays come from the West.
But this place is not mine
it’s a rectangle, an intersection,
the flea market.
Under the breath of the grey morning
the cramped grids stretch
not yet inhabited by heavy leather
and the bric-à-brac, already a heap,
study the sensual poses they will assume
lying on catwalks or easy trestles.
And I may even have the eye of a cheetah
but that painted peacock, the compliment
received as a pretext to introduce oneself,
a well-cut dress to divert a time
otherwise spent bringing my mechanical self
rhythmic gulps of foamy glass —
that peacock, now it’s my back,
and the parade along the stalls
is not the gait of an afternoon,
the stroll before the shift,
but one of the many stations that mewl
in this return morphed into via crucis.
Filthy hands I gladly shook,
and I mounted my first bicycle.
Waterlooplein, April 23rd
