John Hennessy

Diasporas

                        True union differentiates.

                                                                --Teilhard de Chardin

Remember how you felt when you first got to Amsterdam, Al,

            how proud you were of your rented blue room in the Jordaan,

            the single window over a street smelling of deep fryers

            and showarma, fish store and shag smoke,

How rich you seemed with a cone of fritjes met satay, pack

            of twenty-five Camels, chocolate bar melting in the pocket

            of your overcoat, another good day busking?

We ranged wide orbits around each other, you’ve told me

            yourself you ticked off time in biscuits and coffee

            waiting to come get me again—I’d meet you with some

            complicated new handshake just to hold on to you

            before cycling off to find Dirk, Abdullah, Sef, and Raven

(Raven! with his half-warehouse full of broken stolen bicycles,

            two walls gone, roof caving, tent among the rubble

            on the Herengracht, his tea set and boom-box, potted

            aspidistra, stunted ficus, constant grubbing: drinks, Drum,

            quarters, just a quartje, even he seemed charming then),

All of them drunk, leaning in leather-jacketed seriousness

            against the wall in Onnie’s or the Minds,

            lurching around the dancefloor like clipper ships

            after attack by pirates at the Korsakoff or Vrankrijk,

And the club’s new décor’s really cheerful stuff, Satanic kitsch:

            musty black and red theater curtains cover walls,

            whips, bits, construction-paper flames tacked to corners,

            a huge plastic goat’s head hangs from the ceiling,

            the center of some crude pentagram-and-candle

            chandelier illuminating dancers down below,

Look, Dirk’s radiating the first drink’s flush, eyes sinking

            into purple moats, turreted cheekbones, crenellated

            brow ridge, his mood large, skin warm, pocket

            full, his monthly student’s six-hundred has come

            helping him court yet another young Englishman,

This one’s done Marx at uni and hates Americans, don’t they

            always find me—he argues my people’s spontaneous generation,

            locust-like consumption, perennial invasions, while I weigh

            seven centuries spent under his, the protest behind my present expatriation,

But you—diplomat’s brow—give cue-ball kiss, Glasgow sniff, quick

            snap of your wit and Dirk’s holding him up, hands on his chest,

            I wipe the spit off your stubbled cheek, early crow’s feet,

There’s no gauntlet to slip but the cost of drinks, so we leave

            shouting, slalom home through stunted amber posts,

            carry our bikes down steps at Sarphati bridge

            where the river narrows and splits into canals

            running like spokes, connecting defining

            the city center’s wheel of concentric semi-circles,

Let’s cycle off the bulkhead here, break up that shimmer

            of dock lights on the Amstel, cast off Yank or Pom,

            Mick and Kiwi, take keffiyeh scarf, septum ring

            and steel-toed boots, fisherman’s cap and Irish slicker,

            take the light from this tired old goat, his leather shadow,

            the splash and suck as river swallows bike, plenary offering,

Take all of it and where are you, come memory or overworked organ,

            we said we were from the New World, the oldest joke

            there is, and how far from there we’ve wandered.

Lines for Ru

Who revived me from a living death

not least of all through a series of little deaths.

Who’s one minute capable of feeling

the loneliness of Central Park

Flaco, sole Eurasian eagle-owl

in all the five boroughs, laughing as she

pries apart pomegranate seeds the next.

Who calms me as easily as British mysteries,

and what else could be as relaxing (high tea to low C,

series of manor house poisonings, the pudding’s

odd almond flavoring, witty Surrey plonking, sherry

laced with strychnine, incest in the home counties)

as English people killing each other—to a Hennessy?

Who’s my pillar of fire, delivering me

through desert and delusion equally.

Who makes trips to Lowe’s or Target

as shady and explosive and engrossing

as an afternoon alone in the Gulbenkian

or solo cypress evenings in its garden.

And even better, the near-daily

supermarket sprints, so many meals

and conversations accruing in our cart.

What is it that draws me toward lines for you

as corny as Nebraska, when you’d perform

Ophelia as they sometimes did

during the second Intifada—

suicide bomber atomized effortlessly,

detonated beneath a palace orange tree?