I: ARRIVAL
On Polonia we are the only ones to get off.
Without shadows the memory ceases:
palm trees languish, the runway melts,
ash blows from the drums in the nearby street.
The hall looks like the barracks of his accounts
where, many quarrels later, we only really arrive.
Everything fine: sweat drips onto the planks,
stamps are pressed onto dried-out pads.
We have to pass along empty avenues, past
the mouldering palace to get to his birthplace. Turn
around. It is too still. Such quietness doesn’t belong
to the city, just as little as you, crazy enough, suit me.
II: ASSIGNMENT
Then the city yields, noise blazes a trail.
For an instant we are part of each other,
I show respect, he rewards our oath of secrecy.
Now, here too, he hears those voices in his head.
No beer in the Arab quarter slakes his thirst,
no line of verse does mine for the answer to all
the nighttime questions you put to me through your net.
About what he destroys in you. And you still do in me.
Drunk, he climbed on a stub to film their house
behind the fence with barbed wire and broken glass.
Both father and stump too small. At long last
the final word: ‘Rewrite me, record it all.’
III: PREY
As outsiders we stroll into the land that closes
behind us with the twilight. The city hubbub dies
away and even their bickering about how they
had wanted to hold off the enemy here. Even
further we walk on, to celebrations in Hotel de Boer,
parades, the proceeds of jewels, adultery.
Only now do I see your father, in the frosty garden,
air gun at the ready, just as he saw you.
We become vacant, stripped of all fear.
We return different, and stay quite silent.
A prey in the distance screams the night open.
Quieter than at our approaching farewell. Home.
Publisher: In de Knipscheer, December 2003.
Book: € 15,00, cd (music by Dirk Stromberg): € 18,00. Set book + cd: € 29,50.
Postbox 6107, 2011 HC Haarlem, The Netherlands.
www.alberthagenaars.nl
www.indeknipscheer.nl
