The male fairy shrimp swims upside down
with exactly 11 pairs of limbs
grasping her for days before dying.
On Broadway it’s “Bodies” not “Minds.”
Manhattan eyes weaken
at cornea’s edge.
Amsterdam’s overfilled rooms
were floated off long ago
leaving only doors & windows,
allowing eyes to liquify,
ooze from optic nerve,
drip down stone Stedelijk steps,
flow into the polder
& pool in a milky essence
of seen & unseen.
In Amsterdam
become the where in some-where
openings are perennial.
In Amsterdam
everything is low-lying, sight is communal,
prismatic, a psilocybin of antidote
(as when the rain catches itself midair
& decides to remain cloud-borne
because it prefers to see itself as indistinct).
In Amsterdam
atheism anesthetizes, urgently
summons art & science to incest.
Once you arrive in Amsterdam
I’ll place a fleshy asterisk upon the Continent
from which to chart all such emigrations,
from the hoary tail
of all that has gone before
& counsels no more
to the elsewhere I too
swim upside down
grasping at days.
25 May 2012 | for Blake