
Painting by Bob van Buuren. Photograph of Van Buuren by Sander Troelstra. Hermitage Amsterdam.

Painting by Bob van Buuren. Photograph of Van Buuren by Sander Troelstra. Hermitage Amsterdam.


While I was out looking
all these other
people came along
whose names I
never heard, their sound
being buried in my
own next word –
oh we’ll be galloping, galloping
high on our horse and absurd!


On your white porch fronting your dense
Catskill wood you’ll wander the mind backward
through the midnight ocean, the black
forest, golgotha, to, at last, our primieval
garden. You’ll wonder what went wrong.
Who’d mean to keep old God away? Not you,
though you did, as now, his cross but a
seesaw – up and down and nothing changed.
Our hook is hidden in no dancing fly.
It hangs above the water with no enticement but
impalement. Our strength is in stillness
and waiting.

Later you want for it to have
been something and meant something,
to have unfolded inevitably like
the glance the cup the door the kiss and the dream,
but for now all you have is
the want in later you want