In Amsterdam

here humans make sounds
remarkably like language
it’s only when they laugh that one can enter
moods housed in dictionary bodies

the sun is out
weak and welcome
trees that would bloom
are doing so

I wander the streets
a curious bone or two out of place
ready to smile
if frontiers of teeth meet me half way

girls go by in windswept bicycles
tiny cars collide with distance

I enter the museum
chat with Vermeer in a corner
father confessor that he is
I tell him my troubles
with paint and brushes

he shrugs
bless you he says
you smell of nicotine

clocks inside me suffer from jet lag
a slippery moon haunts the sky
it is a plunger that flushes the marsh
choked with the hair of sleep

go see him
Vermeer says
pointing to an old man
standing by the Night Watch

I tell him I can’t
lions of light are dying
by the thousand afternoons

I share a room with a fly
outside the streets are humid
the alleys coarse yet there
tiny flowers lift off
from every cranny
like the hot dog vendor
who emerges from under his van
having fixed the brakes