poetry

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

XLIV

For Benedict Anderson

I do suppose it's self-evident
in my stride, if not my countenance:
that as my legs carry me around this city,
my mind takes a walk somewhere else.

A turbaned Indian, a bearded man,
typically riding a motorbike in Manila,
the Bumbay everyone warned children about
to make them shut up or guzzle their milk—

he stopped me as I paced to the church,
after visiting the beribboned Homomonument
this afternoon of the Gay Pride Weekend.
He had the uncanniest thing to say:

" You're a lucky man, and you know why,
it's because you think a lot!"
I muttered thanks, went my own merry way,
even as what he proclaimed now becomes,

predictably enough, self-realizing:
here I am, thinking or writing again.
And I don't know if I'm any luckier.
It's inescapable, though, this translational life,

this seeing through a stranger's lidless eyes,
this relentless making sense of perception.
The thing is, I can't anymore forget who I am
than this world deny what it is: different.

And how. The fluvial parade on the grachten
was wacky and noisy and something else to see,
even as it's the same parade anywhere, really.
Only nobody marched here, for everyone floated

on boats commandeered to ferry queer loads
of drag queens lipsynching Diana and Gloria,
middle-aged gays dressed up as dancing sailors;
middle-aged lesbians in a Sound of Music tableau,

Fraulein Mariah and the big-boobed Von Trapps;
a band of butchy bears in Village People togs,
thonged gaydiators mock-pumping the saucy air;
dykes and their femmes in beige body stockings

with life-like dongs dangling from the pubes;
and the occasional, russet-skinned tokens
dressed up in the loud feathers of exotic fauna,
shaking their shoulders in Mardi Gras fashion.

Everywhere, the pink-white-and-purple badges
wafting in the air as confetti or balloons.
Here and there, stalls of brewed commerce:
Heineken, Grolsch, Hoegaarden—

escorted by transportable plastic pissoirs.
Later, wedged into a heaving mass of Otherness
crammed into a street party on Reguliersdwars,
I lost myself, and for a panting moment believed

this was the world of all my dreamy affections.
Amsterdam's cool sleep troubled by its perverts,
a flaming portent of the life that is to come:
white skin upon brown, bouncy breasts

on hard chest, pierced nipple to pierced nipple,
male cheek to female jowl, taut arm to fat back,
gay body to straight body to bodies-all-in-transit.
And inching through the moist, throbbing horde

of fetching green, brown, blue, and gray gazes,
of topless tattooed torsos grinding to Madonna,
of twosomes and threesomes frenching, foreplaying,
I copped a feel from a passing tanned buttock,

as swift hands copped some feels from my crotch.
And they were not a violation, they felt great!
At mass, I knelt down to praise God's mercy,
that provides and blesses, pardons and heals,

even as it was clear the hushed crowd in the church
wasn't and would never be the crowd outside it,
celebrating the spirit through the delirious flesh.
Just now, it occurs to me: the nature of my luck

is nothing if not the nature of my nature.
I'm from a country where gays kneel on pews,
receive the Eucharist cross-dressed and pious;
recite novenas to the Holy Child and His Mother,

looking on with warm eyes, perpetually helpful;
dance in the streets with the Niños in our arms,
made up like dolls, after our own mottled likeness;
and yes, despite or precisely because of all this,

march proudly, kiss proudly, desire proudly
our own genital gender. I come from a place
where contradictions lie spooning each other,
clasping tight their griefs, embracing their sins.

A world admitting one without barring the other—
where body is spirit craving matter's dark touch.
Thinking of one's difference is owning oneself.
Self-possession is the beginning of all pride.

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