The Map of Amsterdam

The Map of Amsterdam


What does love search for

if not to grow wings
and become a hermaphrodite.

Is it not the obsession of the loved one

to burn your summer

until you cook like escargot and die?

(I was kneeling in front of him,

my mouth on his hardness.

His knees trembled and swayed.

When I looked up

his eyes were closed

and he asked:  Do you love me?)

Love, immobile happiness

of the swamp.

Who was he to my intimate places

to ask me that discomforting question?

Did his wings carry the same dark dirt

as my map.  Had he found my scent in Paris

and lost me in the canals of Amsterdam?

Had he found that place in me— 
the where

where he could always return?


ii.

I had fallen in love with a man

who had a name to protect.

I shut myself up in the bedroom for days

buried under shame.

Friends brought me look-a-likes,

but it only made me smell of bitter sweat

and dead gardenias.

I’d listen to them speak

as if from a far distance, eyelids heavy,

like stones swollen with salty wetness,

cheeks flushed as if with fever.

After a while, they’d find a hollow place

inside themselves and crouched there

until the storm around me abated.

Then I’d sing spirituals and tell stories

of birds and people with thin hearts.

Meanwhile the man with a name to protect

would walk around the city punching

every glass window he could find

until he’d reach my house. Friends

would let him in. He’d sit on the edge

of my bed and trace his finger across the recess

of my ass. Everyone in the room would disappear

and leave the two of us together. No one ever

heard us talk— 

two men

above            

time and space.