VLIEGENDE KINDEREN:

VLIEGENDE KINDEREN: flying children

“who

is invisible enough

to see you”― Paul Celan

I

A child dances carefully over a dampened dike, tonguing the sky

On one side the nurturing marsh, the other the wide sea and the world.

She thinks of her quiet grandmother and opens memory:

You see she palaces herself close to similar distances, the boats curved like kettles, the distance like tears

And shouts into the mud bee-hiving the bottom of the wall

To share the echo rich in her throat, the careless alphabet of her grammar:

For in her memory, her grandfather moves through veils with a hush, the gunner’s torrent

The letters to her lost love perfumed by his sweat, dirt and shales, coins offered as love,

As he peels himself aside the way a tin roof peels apart when catching fire.

The scratch of a fallen leaf in a November gutter.

Is this the sound of his remembrances—

Is this child wilding over the stone and sea beckoning his memory.

In that letter, he shreds thoughts as if his skin a transparent rattle.

Along the stone wall, she sings his name.

A train ride away, he becomes sheltered under her singing:

He is old and grows immortally young: Uitwaaien.

II

That man you see with the face as long as an opening remark,

And fingers like the wool of trees, baaaahing,

Notices you, so she tells herself, and some essence is sensed.

There in the winter village, a puppy tastes the white flesh of a lost bone

Buried long before recovery.

Remember, he has seen a child on a blue train, remembering,

Playing with a clean, rubber ball against a passing window

While the mother, a country away on the adjacent seat,

Dreams of the colour of teeth, and the breath silt against the January window.

Later, he sings to her of his own children, long asleep as the carriage couples over the nation gone.

How they flew kites on a Dutch hill near the sea and imagined their names inked in the sky by the colours,

How they pulled the cloth bodies from the sky like stars, their imagination and hope

Until they too grew sky-held and drifted upward like bubbles and baubles tossed aside,

Vliegende Kinderen, he christened them.

His children learned to fly before he had.

This distance subscribes companions.

Now that man uncovers things, the granddaughter whispers,

Folds his body together in memory with the child’s reluctant eyes

Tastes the train-mother’s laughter and joins with them like a net.

And this little girl continues remembering over the dampened dike.

Have you heard her slipping: Hè Hè

III

The man tells his granddaughter bedtime stories, Amsterdam-green.

She sings her grandfather evening songs, neglectfully cleaned.

They two, are pebbles falling from the room,

The sound broken wide open, the temperamental duration of things,

Long the green eyes, as her hands reach out to comfort and the sky runs rogue, and rouge.

IV

He tells her:

The sweet distance from which you have journeyed,

The measure between the tip of a finger

And the slender touch of the sky

All that orchestra and manoeuvres.

Move through the darkness as a key move through a lock.

The arch of your silver journey an undoing

That grows wild with each touch.

The train that hurried you over dreams is a single gesture,

The train that steeped you toward the cows along the slopes and the lantern alleyways,

The man who nearly died, the women who beckoned their suffering and stubbornness.

The world sleeps between your palms.

IV

Vliegend Kinderen,

The man you see with the face tempered like the back of a mirror

And his eyes like the throat of a shell, the clock shelling each of our times water-forward.

Notice his heartbroken desire for all the people around, beginning with himself and his granddaughter.

She reaches after him, the crowd and madness and bends like a stream.

The dike that carries the weight of your body but a gesture,

The question mark stamped in the key of a typewriter iron bending,

The kite-wings that pull you upward along the shore, the beach bare from love.

All beginnings and propinquity seeds on your tongue.

Vliegende Kinderen,

Teach us to walk over countries of broken glass

With the ease of paper tumbling, leanly from hand to hand,

In case of your cloth bodies the drifting: you are delicate over the land.

You, flying.

V

Raising over the land, you reach, and I understood,

From the time I bore you under my heart,

Child,

You were my flower and soil.

Care for that, forever.