1988
Straight from the shower,
I lay, still wet, on the cool sheet of the bed,
summer air from the open window
licking across my body, lapping up
the droplets. The broken glass on the floor,
the silence of the room and the city
outside - pretending I don't notice these things,
motionless for, what - an hour? Two?
Neither fully awake, not really asleep,
the heat, the thick air erasing the passing of time.
On the balcony, there is a small wooden table
where I eat sometimes; a bottle of wine, some fruit,
bread, cheese. Very European. I sit and watch the canal,
the ducks and flatboats. The man who lives next door,
a retired judge, told me that his son had fallen
into the water as a child and they'd pulled him up with
a rope of tied-together bedsheets. The next day they'd gone
to de Bijenkorf to buy a new set and his wife had slipped
on the bottom step of the tram and hit her head on the
cobblestone ground and died. That was in 1987, he said.
They kept the rope of sheets, wound up like a pale snake,
in a basket by the door - just in case, he said. But no one,
he wanted me to know, had fallen from his balcony since.
I can understand keeping a thing like that, however
improbable the need. And yet, could I sleep at night
with that spiralled memory, a phantom waiting in the corner
to surprise me each time I accidentally stubbed my toe against it,
or swept the dust bunnies from behind it? All the gifts
take also, in their time; salvation has its costs,
the years given, but less full.
It's better than nothing, people say. Maybe, but whoever
really stops to think about the nothing?
The same people who think about a boy flailing,
treading water as best he can while his father rips up sheet after sheet,
tying them together as quickly as he can,
the same people who think about the turn of an ankle
in a high-heeled shoe, the coolness of stone against a temple,
cool like a damp bedsheet, cool like sunlight
fractured through shards of broken glass,
cool like all the years to come.