Leaving Amsterdam we pass walls filled
With balloon-tire graffiti, phonemes bulging, fat vowels
Swelling in swarms of syllables strung out into signatures.
WORKING CLASS HEROES, AZURE II, PISTOL PETE.
Engorged anaconda curls of pink and green, ornately self-obliterating,
From Artists Anonymous.  Signed
In desperation.  Ready to recant.  Get me out.

*

Banal parataxis of cell-phone chatter down the aisle
Of the train.  I am; he was; I’m like, come on; get with 
The project.  A faith, that it all falls into place,
From some angle.  In the logic of plain reportage. 
What happened, how it was, and what became 
Of our parents, our children, who grew up into the people
We see out the window, at crossings, as receding figures.

*

My father wanted to see Alaska before he died.
A ship of the Royal Dutch Line picked him up in Seattle
And sailed north.  He looked out from the deck 
At what they said was Alaska, and went down below
To see it again, from the window of his stateroom, 
Too sick to care much.  Well, that was Alaska.
What does Alaska look like?  Or anywhere,
When the future belongs to everyone but you?

*

Flat repeating fields of gravestones
Flash by, replaced by others, buried in the ranks they fell in,
Young men at the age of disbelief,
Disemboweled, their arms and legs, their faces
Blown off as they advanced, in pale green fields,
The seabed reclaimed and filled with graves.







*

Low-polluting factories, beige tile walls, accents of brown-tinted steel.

Crisp Mondrian squares, tulip farms, in simple, child-like yellows and reds.

Shell-gas canisters, their glazed white gleam, bound in clusters on flat-bed trucks.

Brown Holsteins blocking the horizon, exported to England by Cuyp.

* 

When Van Ostade was painting “The Slaughtered Pig,”
He thought, “if I could marry a rich widow, the way Bol did,
I would give up painting entirely.”  
A dowel was wedged in, spreading the ribs
To display the inner architecture
Of bones, with their red fringe of ripped flesh.
It is said to point a moral, that uncontrolled lust
Or speculation can kill, that tulip futures can crash
And ruin the future, though what it shows, I think,
Is the artist’s skill and ambition, his eagerness to escape.

*
 
In Leowarden, the red-light district.
Two windows over a bar.  One empty.  In the other
A local woman, bathing in a basin.  Seen from below,
The angle is severe, the image sharply cropped.

In the central square, a larger-than-lifesize statue of a cow.

A picture of Mengele’s wide-eyed children, in the museum,
Their skin darkening from injections.

*

40,000 Frisian men would die, fighting for the German Special Forces.

Say it had been your son, for instance?  What would you say?

The Dutch camps for collaborators, after the war,
Are called unimaginable, the treatment there, unspeakable.



*

These flat sea-level fields, some even below sea-level, were drained by brilliant engineers, in demand for their expertise all over Europe, who commanded enormous fees for their services, and in the time of the Spanish Horror, when the need to resist or escape was desperate, the same engineers were called in again, this time to flood the fields, a wide brimming flood to keep the enemy ships at bay, a stroke of genius, delaying the arrival of the nightmare, arms and legs hacked off, guts strung up, the horrors of war, which Goya, the Spanish maestro, shows us in his series of sketches bearing that title.

*

Sailboats down an unseen canal, sliding through rows
Of thin saplings.  Quick pencil strokes.
The last light’s dull pewter.

*

Warehouse walls bloom with words, decorative
And packed with content, cave walls, tomb walls, alive
With swelling designs in dayglo-green and cartoon-pink,
In retro fashions, fuck our parents, fuck the pigs,
Fuck the state in its slow intolerable fading, and you.
NEW SOUL KINGS, MAD MIKE, CRUISING WITH THE KILLER.
Today’s new poetry, enjoy anywhere,
Take it home with you.  Signed, Anonymous.  Left out to weather.