poetry

From "Poems from Amsterdam: A Cycle"
by J. Neil C. Garcia

LX

Something incongruous today
at the Dam, front of the phallic memorial,

within view of the National Palace
and Madame Tussauds:

two men, both pudgy and pale,
play for coins on their dusky violins

John Williams's theme
for Schindler's List—

the saddest song I've ever heard
from one of the saddest films I've ever seen.

The two are so enmeshed in my senses
one calls the other to mind,

and never fails to choke me up each time.
And there couldn't be

a less appropriate occasion,
for today, the side-by-side squares

are more public and chirpy than usual.
Gone are the mimes dressed up

as bronze statues or as mimes,
the jugglers jesting, the rockstar wannabes

all jockeying for attention and for cash.
Today, the site is a fairground

complete with standard fairground rides:
a wheel, a spiraling slide, a carousel.

And booths selling fluffs of pink sweets,
stuffed animal shapes, balloons, knickknacks,

and the chance of hitting a bull's eye
with either darts or air guns.

Everywhere, the frisky forms of children,
both wishful and real,

licking their scooped ice cream,
their faces carefully laved

by the slanting summer sun.
Everywhere, the sound of flushed laughter

blending with car horns and tram bells.
And still, the strings' brooding strains carry

through the dappled delirium to my ears.
And I'm back in the secret annex

of a wartime jelly and jam factory,
above a warehouse on Prinsengracht;

back to the steep staircase,
the narrow bedroom, the porcelain washbowl,

the lone commode in a cramped water closet,
magazine cut-outs pasted on chipped plaster walls.

The sepia likeness of lives no longer living——
back to the Europe of little Anna's childhood,

frozen in the cursives
of her nimble hand's script.

This house and its inked memory
still beckon from within this city,

and stand upon the foot
of a painfully learned truth:

take heed, for this world ever teeters
on the void's slick brim,

where life's a fugitive grace.
Hearing its downy, birdlike voice

alongside the fiddled importuning,
I almost believe they're sounds

wafting up from the depths
of a black, yawning evil.

Meantime, the young men's round faces,
pressed longingly to their instruments' sides,

reveal the familiar look of love, or of loss.
Together, they summon the soul's

faintly flickering presence,
which proves to be as inconsolable

on this balmy summer day,
as they and I are inconsolable.

Not only because we know what's lost
can't ever be restored;

but that returning from its journey
from the darkness of forgetting,

history's brave music arrives into the same
bright and indifferent world.

Notes:

The house where Anne Frank and her family lived and hid in still stands on Prinsengracht, around the old Jordaan district of Amsterdam. It is now a museum housing various memorabilia, including Anne's original diary.

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