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America
Peter Verstegen
This is to be the poem of my fortieth year,
The year I must sort out the mess with my woman,
After some summers the flaws come out.
My murderous silence in the cab to the airport,
Thinking we'd miss the plane through her clumsiness:
Not very cool or relaxed, and we were right on time.
Posters: Concorde's myopic white raven:
'Fly the Future, Fly the flag'. Our flight
Was Air India, quite teahouse-like inside,
So ceremonious, the serving beauties wore
Flowery sarongs over shrunken green T-shirts,
And Buddha-like marriage marks as third eyes.
A wall decoration showed a white-bearded man
With his two girl companions, playing chess
On a tasselled chess mat, elephants for rooks,
A waterpipe and a plate of delicacies handy.
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America's coast, green flatland, full of woods,
Sprawling out into the sea. This is the North Country
Leif called Vine Land, to lure other Danes to this shore.
Into the City, the buildings less tall than imagined,
Small wispy trees on top of a lot of them.
First impressions: police cars emitting
Wailing war cries, infernal roar and rattle
Of subways, the wildly sprayed graffiti,
Gaudy paint everywhere, even on ceilings:
'Wake up ya bunch of sardines, yer late for work'.
Sudden lightning in one splintered window
From an oncoming train thundering by.
People erect and drawn-in, life weighs heavy on them.
Some are asleep here and still 'I don't trust you'
Is written all over their faces. A young black however
Stands reading the Penguin Book of Lieder.
Outside they are all so busy, even the poet
Peddling his wares at a penny a line.
Where to relax? Try the Natural History Museum:
The big display-box with African mammals.
A King Kong-aping gorilla stands in the distance;
Watch his female there, munching so peacefully.
Africa all greenish and blueish, apart from
The snow glow of Kilimanjaro on the horizon.
What about art here? No one ever surpassed
The Lascaux Cave bison bulls in stark red and black,
Altamira's Reclining Bull is as daring
An abstraction as Picasso can ever have dreamt of,
And Henry Moore never did more than play some
Variations on the theme of the Lespugue Venus
With her embryo head and waistbelt of full-blown buttocks.
The eery cave colours, faded ochre, sandy and brown.
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But there are plenty more tranquil places around here.
On the Ferry people have fun, a bunch of black schoolkids
Are dancing to cassette music, one clowning like mad,
The jester, is kissed by all the girls in succession.
New York's skyline in an afternoon haze
Emerging in hues of grey and black and silver,
The fishmarket smell of the sea, the white sailing boats,
The Statue's Roman robes and torch pointing skyward.
We watch al this from the deck of the Corneliuś Kolff
(His family and mine for some time disputed
The burgomastership of a small Guelders town).
In this huge town is a place where houses are low:
Greenwich village has lovely shaded gardens
With whitewashed walls and elegant white wire chairs,
SOAVE, BOLLA around you, and pasta and pizza,
The leafy Sumac trees, their Japanese shadows at night.
Snatches of talk: ‘And he asked me what had been
The happiest time in my life and I said:
“Right now! Right now!” and that at seventy-seven.’
And all the ads and slogans: ‘If you see
Someone without a smile, give him one of yours’.
‘New York is no longer a one chicken town’.
‘Life is fragile, handle with prayer’.
‘It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken’.
The messenger boy turned executive on TV,
Making up for poor education, he candidly claimed,
By paying for three university chairs.
The blind pianist who wrote Lullaby of Birdland,
Replying to ‘So you don't feel, let's say, deprived?’
With a vehement 'Not at all!' For failure,
Not even congenital failure, can be admitted.
‘Sight is but a slight part of perception, sir!’
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Melodious ‘Oh wow! 's around you; these policemen:
Their voices sleepy to assuage the tension within;
Telephones ringing, air-conditioners, refrigerators
Making eternal noise; Italians on shaded benches,
Straw-hatted all; a caterpillar salvaged by S,
For butterflies must be sparse here; deformity
and beauty all thrown together, antique fire-engines,
The quiet lakeside view and the skyline seen from the park.
Hard-working old-timers are pointed out to you:
‘Old Papa Billy there’ (little old black man carrying trays)
‘He seventy-eight years old and doesn't give in.’
They seem to keep struggling on to the end, the wino
Accosting, fruitlessly, one more waiting car at the red light.
But it struck me how many of those living here,
Far removed from what people should look like, try
To overcome the city's grimness by being sweet-tempered.
Then we drove to the South, colonial style hotels,
Full of two hundred-pounders ballroom-dancing at night.
All that religion on radio: ‘God's gonna send you someplace!
Be born again! Praise the Lord! For the fear of God, hallelujah!’
The vastness, the alikeness of those coreless cities,
The suburban space with these wide-lawned white frame houses,
The emptiness of the woodlands, the perfumed country,
The whiffs of honeysuckle drifting in through the window,
The steaming shoulders of roads after a rainstorm,
Raindrops scurrying upwards across the windshield,
The names of small towns: Montezuma, Shoe Town, Valhalla.
Carolina, still boll weevil-ridden, fenceless graveyards,
And huge signs, Piggly Wiggly, the Frog and Brassiere Tavern,
Empty old Uncle Tom cabins, pillared porches, Baptist churches,
Yellow and reddish dustroads, deserted menhirs destined
To support future bridges, if ever, for overhead traffic.
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In Georgia it was hot and the ivy-draped fir trees
Looked like giant bears and looming giants.
The odd exploded tyre dogsbody-like on the road.
Dee-jays talking all day about today's test-tube baby
And assorted local murders; yucca trees in bloom.
My darling barely avoided certain death for us both
When overtaking an eighteen-tyre truck on a slippery road
And I had to swerve when a car quite suddenly stopped,
Near Plains, where we went to look for this president's roots.
At his cousin's brie à brac store I bought a small note-book,
We had 'r filled up at his brother's and drank Billy's beer.
But we did not go to his former home, now museum.
At his TV-press sessions, I noted, he cannot stand still,
He keeps wobbling just like a nervous schoolboy.
To me it is proof that he is one of the good guys,
But the bad ones, I fear, will hardly be impressed.
The uniformity of motels is almost total,
But she's different in each, she is beautiful -
Her heart-shaped upperlip, her almost almond eyes.
Clothes don't do her full justice, her nakedness always disarms me,
Her little feet, the smoothness of strong, small buttocks,
Taut hipbones beside soft belly, the furry cleft,
Her nipple-pressing breasts so fully filling my hands,
The thrust and suction of her darling cunt.
One feature is still foreign to me, will remain so:
The caesarian line of chin-neck I just have to accept:
Her strength must show someplace. Away with those dregs,
And enjoy, enjoy the pure Saskianess of her being.
But her sense of efficiency sure can be most dismaying,
And if only she shouldn't so generously state what is obvious.
I have to subdue her a little, to be able to go on,
But there is distrust to defeat: she too is a good guy.
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I could not stand New Orleans at first. The noise
And rip-off tourist jazz, the Disneyland-quality of
The strip-joints with their bottomless tabletop dancing
In the reputed French quarter, where we got robbed too:
Her purse with the drugs I had counted on to help us
Sort out the problems between us, find ourselves peace.
But soon I gave in and enjoyed it all and we rode
The ferryboat to Algiers, the wheelboat threedecker too,
Along a stretch, mostly harbour, of old Mississippi River:
Napoleon Avenue Wharf. They expected him here
To escape from his prison island, take over Louisiana
And build a new French empire in the new world,
But he couldn't make it. His ulcers - or was it poison?
We took a cartride too and found a few friends
And answered many times the ‘Where you all from?’
And I became forty here, the age of a young oak.
Forty years back; a heat-wave in The Hague.
My mother, seven months gone, still bicycling,
Gave birth: I was put in a cubicle of glass
And still I sometimes feel like a fish in a tank.
Now it's the seventh year since I found my mate
And she delivered me into a better life,
A heightened sense of living, badly needed,
And love - that's what I think one minute, but the next
I damn her habit of taking so long for a snapshot
Or emphatically explaining what is well known.
But let me try to describe our celebration
In some detail: our breakfast, a four-course meal,
We took in the spacious walled-in, tree-lined garden
Of a former brothel, with gaslight, and an old well,
And sun and shade and cool, cool tiered fountains,
A parrot screeching hello with a feminine drawl.
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She gave me brushes, paint, paper, a leather pouch,
An old copper token that would have paid for one night:
‘Screw, bath and beans. Eight ladies and two squaws’.
Five books and the smartest red-blue Puma shoes
That make me stalk so fast I have to restrain them.
I tried a watercolour of our swimming pool,
Not catching the shiny lights on the rippling water,
And read. There was thunder in the air with occasional rain.
Storm Amelia was drawing near, Mohammed Ali was in town.
Later we watched TV, a program about Hiroshima:
Where the bomb exploded now stands a Howard Johnson's.
We watched a Ufo-film and a Godfather spin-off
And decided at the same time that Robert Mitchum
Might make a perfect Maigret if he stopped playing he-men.
And then we got into a leisurely session of love
And concluded the day in another posh eating place.
California was our next stop: the lake-side beach we reached
Through the pines and then a very steep walk downhill.
The timeless boulders there, climbed perhaps once a decade,
From where we watched the life of the lake, the tiny
Fish half an inch in length, multitudes of them,
Waterspiders rowing the surface, jumping like mad.
We, being naked, belonged to this nature too.
My girl with the grace of a girl on a Grecian urn
Walking the rocks and the water was lapping so softly.
Small pebbles I made slip through my hands, inviting the thought
Of the finite number of hours that make up one's life,
So many of them spent in mental numbness or worse.
‘Not amused’ is by far the worst attitude in life,
Human diversity in itself enough to amuse you.
And while deep in these philosophical meditations,
Saskia pointed out how many stonelets were gems.
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This poem may be sprawling like America itself,
I must be honest to the man I am to become,
Who twice my age, may be, will be judging me if I
Am to be as old as the Pope who died today.
The boy, they say, is the father of the grown man,
But I would say the reverse applies as well.
I am father to that pimply youth in Paris,
Preposterously pretentious, twenty years ago.
I clearly remember a daydream I had in those days:
If only I could live on with part of my mind asleep,
For twenty years, and then wake up to myself.
I was so curious who I would be by that time.
Well, I would not have been too displeased, I think, after all.
If only the eighty-year-old will be able to say as much.
Clearing cobwebs out of my mind: that is the task
For the next stretch of my life, however long that will be.
augustus/september 1978
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