For: Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943)

i

life occasions long in the moments we nurse from bottles in our pockets

beneath an umbrella shielding the sky from wet loss, we bike over ice and hill toward the North Sea to confront longing, widowed stories bow in the shape of sparrows negotiating air, misbegotten language named in a kettle of boiled dreams where words languish in a grammar of young bones, socks ache in a back room, doorknobs bell against the floor boards in pirouettes and carousel, a clang sputter against bicycle seats buckled to a somnambulant train, the railroad platform conducts sentience into a winter day forlorn in an acrobat’s agility, we forgive misremembered names of the families stuck in time, skin breaths tongues against frozen windows, an old story plugs into the spine of the Dutch passengers trained in wool against respectable seats, the disrespectful weather coughs up phlegm and memory in teacups, the sunrise stirs with day-old vodka and sardines, another the new year clicks over tierail and rubble, another door and another village opens to the knocking of wind, the landscape tacks beam against the light’s spinnaker andvaults before a teenager loses his way in the snow, the doldrums he throws himself into on the tracks, the world forever another step misused against thefalse step of warmth that is not found until July 1942, the herd’s bleat echoes bootblack with tar and stone and you soften, against the tweed’s detritus as History unbuttons in the sand dunes shared between child and politie, scavenging a final Appeltaartt, the clear light crisps sound, dough moistens into clarity on our lips, toward the waves, the waves we hustle in a blink, gone.

ii

how quietly we fall like a heard of trains 
how broken faces smiles on the belly of a mother in the rain
how shadows cast their eyes upon the flora’s long unlimbered limbs
how lovers pen fleshy promises on the sleeves of their coats, unrequited
how lovers lick snow and kibbeling from their teeth, the cadence of wipers
how tales share time in a tin cup with a War widow
how the train wheels diamond kilometres from pebbles toward Wierum’s beaches
how the sea splays love with the brushes of damp hair black as seaweed
how the dying firecrackers and gun burst open the cold mouth of a tunnel
how Amsterdam Centraal unlaces a stew of laughter kept in boots for protection
how numbers separate by fingers when excavated from a frozen Victorian key box
how sleep grasses into songs that muscle over water
how buildings swell with guarded light and the patter of tiny feet
how ghosts railetie grammar for their haunt in the morning gathered with forgetfulness
how a drunken clock barks at the top of the stairs until it's unrun
how quietly we fall from the dunes, our elbows yellowed with bruise, life,or theatre
how a white pebble on a bed of black leaves is left behind as pillow
how a bronze lock dances between a yellow bike’s neck and the limbs of a cinder fence
how the tin water rusts into the hearts gazing at a mirrored shadow
how a half-moon of red lights arches in a vow under a bridge
how the stars blue and become shy in an awkward night blush
how quietly we fall from canals before the first snow slants toward the waves
how soft dots of ink map breath and blacken lives behind shutterless windows
how tables of foreign words tongue rucksacks in an embrace in twilight
how stories pick clean the forlorn chronology, spanners buckled to a waist
how the arithmetic goes unwritten in books, a map once pointed East
how we imagined treasure for thieves in the North quietly as sleep in pockets of yellow flower,
how far from Spring we fall quietly from the sky as soot, pellet and ash far off the sea’s hips
how quietly we fold into dream before the names disappear

iii

let us unmake the grief we hid in our nightshirts
let us tie keys wintered to bridges
let us carry the missing children in the cabooses far away
let us ply over the canals with timber for winter’s warming breath
let us fold our names in the burrows of our shoes
let us fold longing into a braid tied to the back of our necks
let us fold love into seabirds, paper and white cranes
let us become the living after the days the soil has forgotten
as all things too small to write us in
so let us remain expanding my love, let us remain
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