Tag Archives: Dutch

To our naked landlord, seller of cuckoo clocks

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You were the first Dutchman I ever knew

and now I live among your kind, your

fishers and swallowers, ripping up

what they’ve built, running water where

they drained it forty years before,

legal and illegal-

izing their drugs, and letting

the masses in, though not really.

When I was ten I’d have told you,

there treading water in our mud hole,

that I knew a better way –

USA! USA! –

which won the big one

when the chips were down

(mostly) –

but even then, clothed and correct,

I’d have had to concede,

amid blown-out lives

(neighborhoods, brains, gutters…)

that maybe the promised promise

wasn’t always delivered.

So where does that leave us

(Are you dead?)

now I’m in your country

and you’re in mine?

How bout  we split the difference?

You grant me my mountain-prairie-

can-do horizon,

and I you your genius architecture

and painter sky.

Each can keep the people he’s with.

(They’re about the same.)

You’ll not find me, though,

swimming  in no hole.

And those cuckoo clocks you keep for yourself.

Bankschroefje

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I knew what a vise was

but not the word for it in Dutch.

Still, I figured I’d find whatever it was

“on the work bench

on the third floor,

just under the roof.”

I knew I was looking for

something with a screw.

Piet wanted it to fix a clock.

Not a big clock,

a little clock.

A travel alarm,

like what my Grandma would’ve had

in the ’80’s.

It was a gift from an aunt

and the winder was off.

But first I had to find that screw.