Letter to Charles McGeehan

Dear Bertaijn & Charles—Happy Holidays!

It’s been raining steadily for a week, a slow, gentle rain, drumming fingers of rain on the moss-green scalp of my cabin roof nestled beneath live oaks. I’m cozily curled up in bed with the flu, playing with my computer.

There are flash flood warnings in Northern California, Oregon and Washington and record feet of snow has fallen in the mountains. I’ve been lax about writing to anyone since I’ve been back home. A kind of lethargy creeps over me. I do what’s necessary, read, and little else. Perhaps hibernation. . . Of course, it doesn’t help that I have an injured wrist.

Right before I left Amsterdam, I got into a bicycle accident. As I was returning home to Linde Voûte’s on Oetgenstraat from Westerpark, some idiot took a curved wrought-iron flower trellis (the arch that goes over a gate) out of the back of his double-parked car on Prinsengracht (near Utrechtstraat), and swung it in front of me, cutting my right hand. 

I tried to protect my face but smashed into a parked car, bruising my left wrist when I hit the back windshield. It was either smash into a parked car or fly into the canal—which would you choose? It was raining, and the bike’s brakes were no good on wet cobblestone & brick. 

Anyway, I’ve been ignoring my wrist for the past 2 months—until it hurt so badly (I was smashing a clove of garlic with the flat of a knife; the little bones in my wrist made a crunching sound like potato crisps!). I finally went to the doctor who put it into a splint to rest it—a bad sprain. 

I’m slowly typing (two-fingered pecking) this letter wearing my stupid wrist brace—which looks (& is beginning to smell) like an old gym shoe, and as winter’s chill creeps in, my bones ache (snow in the Sierras); injuries don’t heal quite as fast as they used to.

I’m finally finished with my Breytenbach essay on translation. I can’t believe it took me so long to write it, but I didn’t have the background or knowledge necessary to quickly write something. 

Besides, if I knew what I was going to write about, I wouldn’t write at all. What’s the point? The essay & footnotes is nearly 10,000 words (verbose), and it was very difficult for me. It’s long overdue, I hope J.L van Schaik Publishers (South Africa) will still use it!

It’s hard to say exactly how I’ve been wasting my time as I’m never idle. You know how it is, the life of a writer is a proverbial black hole. In Autumn I never have much ($) work: I’m teaching a poetry class to children, ages 6-8; I finished 3 “Elderhostel” classes (California history, poetry, art, etc.) to 60+ year-olds—and my strangest job yet—was as a naturalist leading a group of businessmen on a day hike to the headlands near Sausalito (& the Golden Gate Bridge) last Friday (probably when I caught this cold). 

Did Paul Evans do another issue of ORAL magazine? Charles, you haven’t sent me the second batch of poems that I typeset—you were going to proof them, remember? As soon as I get them, I’ll make corrections ASAP and send you a clean copy of all that I’ve typeset so we can see where the “holes” are. 

Herman got a letter from Guillermo Gelacio, & some photos. Guillermo was concerned with, among other things, Herman’s general sloppiness in the Asian issue. I’ve tried to tell him to take care, he’s losing credibility. 

A good thing we’re near the end of the project. He’s truly incorrigable, and becoming worse with time, impossible to work with. I want to make sure we get our issue together soon so send the corrected poems.

Here’s a letter fragment I never sent:

19 Sept., 1996 (midnight insomnia) Home, I am—and after a week of sunshine, I need dark shades—unused as I am to so much concentrated light. The weather’s turning cold. Fingernail moon (and a total eclipse on the 26th—the last one of the millenium—which I doubt you’ll even see, Dutch weather being what it is. 

Still suffering from acute jetlag, tunnel vision & disorientation by late afternoon is typical (for 6 pm is really 3 am—and I wonder why I have no appetite for dinner!). 

Driving is excruciating (asleep at the wheel is a virtual reality). My cousin Dave’s having the same symptoms. We may have jumped into this culture/time zone but the bio-rhythms aren’t yet shifting. 

He said “I have to keep moving around, flapping my arms, just to keep awake at work.” I laughed at the idea of Dave flapping his wings in an airplane hangar with all those dismantled planes. 

At a lively Brazilian party in San Francisco, I made the mistake of sitting alone on the couch for a few minutes. My eyes may have been open, but that’s all. I couldn’t even speak, let alone understand the Brazilians’ Spanish (who speak with a Portuguese accent). 

I drove Herman Berlandt & his girlfriend, Verona home to Novato, literally cross-eyed, thinking “I’ll never make it home” and slept on their couch. They say it takes a minimum of 1 day of suffering for each time zone. 

I remember how it took me weeks to recover from Russia. How long will I suffer this time? Someone said that in a Concorde jet, you travel so fast, you arrive before you leave—earlier, that is, in New York than when you leave Paris! Where’s Einstein when you need him?

My cousin Sínead (Dave’s sister) and I went huckleberrying last weekend out at our secret spot on a hill near Tomales Bay, where we used to go with my grandmother. (They’re like tiny blueberries with 50 times the flavor.) 

From the isthmus, we could see Point Reyes in the distance, like a comma against the shining sea, separating Drake’s Bay from the raging Pacific—a misnamed ocean. 

Offshore fog rising up like a vast wall where tiny fishing boats disappeared into its maws, made me think of the painter, Turner. The pine forest took a beating from last year’s severe storms—so many uprooted trees met an abrupt end—we used them as aerial pathways up the hillsides. 

Since it’s all part of the Point Reyes National Seashore, we’re not supposed to gather anything—even huckleberries, so I stole an antler. We were hiding from the rangers but we had Sínead’s 22-month-old nephew, Séan to lug through the undergrowth. I had the odd sensation we were re-enacting an age-old ritual, gathering berries before the fall—no matter that our skin is white, not red. 

My aunt will make pies and ice cream, our teeth will be indigo-stained for days (like my fingers). How Pictish! The berries are so labor-intensive (cleaning takes longer than picking) we make jokes, compare them to caviar. (We went to an equinox party at Albert Straus's—a local ranch and made gallons of huckleberry ice cream).

I spent my flight over the Atlantic being terribly sleepy but wide awake with fear. Unfortunately my airplane dessert had hazelnut filling in it, tho they said it was jam. . . and I had to take antihistimines, the stewardesses coming by periodically to see if I was still breathing. I was trying to figure out a place where I could hide to inject myself with adrenaline, if it came to that. 

I’m such a coward around needles and every muscle in your body contracts at once on adrenaline. The one time I had to take it, I could hear my scull crack as every muscle in my scalp went into shrinkwrap overdrive! Zip!

What struck me most about returning home is the sharp, aromatic odor of bay laurel, poison oak pollen, and sun-burnt hay, flavored with the acrid, thirsty dust—the smell of late summer making me nostalgic (like Proust and his madelines?). 

Seeing all the lovely, steep hillsides against a cerulean sky, cloaked in tawny blond oatgrasses like sleeping lions, and the thick green-black oaks roiling in their crotches—so sexual, it surprises me anew each time I return. 

I’ll never forget how the mirrored San Francisco Bay and Mt. Tamalpias (our Mt. Fuji-san) from the fire-ravaged Oakland hills takes my breath away. The Sonoma-Marin Coast Miwok Indian word for the shining golden gate, Yulupa. 

All that’s left of the Bay Area Ohlone Indians’ stories of this landscape is: Dancing on the brink of the world. 

I love this landscape, but not the culture. I hate the vacuous American loudness, the lack of body awareness, the shallow chrome and Formica existence, the urban sprawl. . . the ultimate loneliness. I try to be somewhat tolerant, but I guess it’s not within my nature. And so I am alone, dancing on the brink of I know not what.

My 2nd night home, I was invited to a Sebastopol Arts Council meeting for the promotion of poetry in west Sonoma County, and I felt so jaded. “Been there, done that. Got the shirt. . .” 

Guess I should be glad poetry is so “in” but it just makes me bad-tempered and ornery—especially when they dream big, and haven’t a clue as to what goes on in putting on reading series and workshops, wanting more volunteer labor to make it happen. . .and I’ve got that shirt too—in several sizes. (And it’s got bloody holes in it by now!).

It feels a bit like a mausoleum here, in this poetry mecca of the world (and in my cabin too). I know I’ll grow used to it soon enough. 

I saw a bizarre English movie, The Draughtsman’s Contract, by Peter Greenaway, the director of The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover. At the end there were all these Dutch references—someone speaking Dutch which I could almost understand. It had the peculiar effect of making me homesick for the wrong country. 

They say you always leave a part of yourself behind when you travel. Does that mean there’s less of me returning home each time I go away? (Heminway said: Travel broadens the mind. Writing broadens the ass. I write standing up.)

I’ve got to find a new home for our poetry reading series—book 20+ readers thru Dec. & do a newsletter /mailing on my own (done!). I’ve got a few 2-day teaching jobs with Elderhostel (open university for retired folks) in Oct. One on creativity and the arts, the other on early California history—I’ve got to start cramming the info. in soon. It takes me a while to re-establish those kinds of facts—I teach through telling lively stories and anecdotes—otherwise my elderly “students” will fall asleep.

* * * * * * *

Charles, today’s the anniversary of day President Kennedy was shot. The proverbial question: what were you doing, where were you? (Not on the grassy knoll, I presume!) 

I was in 3rd grade, sick with a flu (like today), sitting with my grandmother with my feet propped on the warm sides of the stove firebox (we have a gas stove with a wood burner for heat in Forest Knolls—not that newfangled modern heating! 

Bertaijn, my Grandmother’s house in Forest Knolls reminds me so much of your wonderful farm house in Rogny! Thank you again so much for inviting us, it was a highlight of my summer). Actually, she was sitting by the stove, I was wallowing around on the floor in my quilted robe like a red and yellow paisley dust-walrus. It was a dreary day, much like today.

My aunt Canice’s husband Bill (Dave’s father—they were staying with us a while. At one time or another, my grandmother’s house was a second home (a flophouse?) for three of her four daughters in various incarnations of distress). 

Bill Dinsmore (a sloppy drunk) came bursting through the front door, mid-afternoon—full of news. He was so excited, I mistook it for joyousness or frivolity. “The President’s been shot!” he shreiked. In retrospect, I think it was merely excitement and shock enhanced by the booze. 

My grandmother’s reaction of anguish (she who had buried a husband, a son and several brothers and sisters by this time), such a bizarre foil to my uncle’s giggling, I didn’t know what to think, only that Kennedy was akin to being a relative in our household. The Irish Catholics have elevated him to secular sainthood.

When visiting my relatives in Ireland in 1973, I was struck by how every house had its altar niche with Jesus and/or Mary (rarely Joseph) and Kennedy illuminated by a (red) votive candle. The sacred heart. Later, in 1989, when I visited Peru, it was like being in Ireland—Kennedy’s half-mast eyes blankly stared out at me from every niche. What do the dead still see from the eyes of photographs?

Of course, lots of controversial stories about Kennedy have surfaced since then. But, regardless of his politics and womanizing, he truly represented something as intangible as hope to so many oppressed peoples the world over. 

I can’t think of another American president that had that kind of global impact. Certainly not the Rosevelts, nor Eisenhower (course I wasn’t really politically savvy yet—born in 1952). Clinton’s been compared to Kennedy—but that’s a joke. Clinton couldn’t even fill the shadows of the soles of Kennedy’s feet. Still, I wonder, what would our perception of Kennedy been like if he’d run for office now, more than 25 years after his death; how would the world view him now?

Weird to see Fidel Castro on the telly the other night, Knnedy’s embargo from the Bay of Pigs crisis still in effect—we get little news of Cuba. I saw him on a Mexican TV channel—no voice of James Earl Jones sonorously announcing in that rich baritone: This is CNN! 

Charles, remember those radio emergency broadcast tests when we were kids? The piercing tones followed by the announcement, “This is only a test. If it had been a real emergency . . .” and we thought maybe the bomb was gonna drop? They’ve just eliminated them (I was surprised to hear them on the BBC radio broadcast you listen to in the morning). Now there’s new technology, just some computer chirps and clicks.

Charles, happy birthday to you too! I forgot the date, fellow Sagge.; my birthday’s in 2 days. I’ll be 44, or as my grandmother would say: Farty-Faer. Fulla hot air in more ways than one—nasty flubug!

1 Dec. Sun. Well, a friend (a student’s mother) whisked me away to the beautiful tourist town of Carmel-by-the Sea for the weekend, so I turned 44 beneath a full Gemini moon by the Pacific Ocean (we were 2 houses away from the beach, a painter friend of hers rented a house for a full month). 

I no sooner returned home (Tues.) and left again to spend Thanksgiving in Novato with Herman and Verona (his actress-girlfriend) and her 2 (adult) children, a Brazilian artist (Zoravia), and a Scottish actor (Neal O’Neill from Glasgow in a kilt (I think I’m in love!) played guitar, so we sang for our supper on full stomachs. 

Herman said he was going to call you, Charles, but every time we get the urge, we realize the hour you definately would not appreciate. There’s that little matter of time. He said he wrote to you but you never answered. He was worried about you, your health. Please write back to us soon.

My innards are still unhappy, so I spent the weekend back in bed reading after nearly a week of socializing. I’ve been reading more on the Celts—discovered that Laon was a celtic hillfort, and later, an Irish monastary until ca. 1500 to 1700 AD. 

My favorite mystery scholar whom I know little about, a founder of many of the continental universities, was Johannes Scottus Eriugena (John, the Irishman b. 810). He taught 25 years at Laon and at the Paris Court School for Charles the Bald (when he wasn’t being accused of heresy—which was often—for his radical doctrine preached the concept of free will. 

Note: this was long before Luther was a gleam in his great-grandparents’ eyes). In 486 the Loire was settled by Merovingin Franks, I don’t remember the dates at Marle. 

Do you have any information on the Abbey ring, Bertaijn? Suffice to say, there were probably still a few Gauls around—surely the Romans didn’t kill them all? Certainly most of the so-called “Roman’ troops were comprised of conquered Gauls—and with the fresh influx of Irish blood—well it seems to explain why everyone was wearing those Celtic beltbuckles! 

The thing is, no other group of people ever accomplished that kind of inlay design work. The Merovingian buckles were pretty crude workmanship though. Let’s all go back to Marle next summer—for a longer stay so I can scout out some history. 

Bertaijn, if you need some manual labor, I’ll be your slave. I’m very good at that sort of thing. Plastering, painting, gardening, etc. I’ve done all kinds of hard labor growing up in the country. Guess I’d better learn some French!

Here’s a little story about Eriugena: An emperor (Charles the Bald?) made a playful pun on two similar sounding words in Latin: sottum and scottum, and asked John what’s the difference between a fool and a Scot (Irishman) to which John replied, “Only the table.” (In Latin, of course: Quid distat inter sottum et scottum?).

The king must’ve been seated across from the Irishman. I bet he was flabbergasted by the answer—talk about turned tables! But then it is said in our myths, satire was the first art form invented in Ireland. 

I found this gem in my friend Vinz’s flat: Adversus stultitiam pugnare nil est laboriusius nulla enim auctonate vinci fatetur nulla ratione suddetor. Which goes something like: nothing is more laborious than to fight against stupidity for it won’t bend to any authority and it won’t be convinced by any reason. 

He must have had some very challenging students at Laon! If I don’t send this soon, it’ll be Christmas! Adieu. A’voir! Kisses & hugs!

P.S/ Well Christmas has come (the goose—well, actually, the turkey— is come and gone), and your package sat on the floor waiting for the last of my photos, and though the pieces were assembled, I forgot to mail this, so now I make another feeble attempt before year’s end. 

When I started this letter it was raining; would you believe it’s still raining! We have flood warnings for tomorrow, the Russian River is to crest at Hacienda Bridge in the afternoon, just 2 miles from my house. The power’s been threatening to go out all day, flickering—we’ve had terrible winds. Small branches falling on my roof and the hood of my truck. In today’s newspaper, a photo of ice skaters in Holland and in the Midwest—South Dakota, I think.

Charles, twice now I’ve tried calling you but no answer. Hope all’s well. I spent Christmas Eve and morning with my cousins Dave and Sinead in Nicasio; Christmas dinner and Boxing Day with Herman & Verona. 

Herman was given an old Mac computer, I have to find him a printer and a monitor. Did you ever get a better computer? What you really need is a letter quality printer ASAP! Your old computer programs might not be able to run the printer though, nowadays everything has its own special programs. 

You really should upgrade your whole system all at once if you can. Surely Anjum can help you? In the past two years there have been so many new chips (Intel, Pentium) invented, that the relatively new computers are now considered “obsolete” and if you can find someone who’s upgrading to a newer system, you should be able to find a deal somewhere. 

Since you only need a system for relatively simple wordprocessing and printing, it doesn’t have to be brand-new! You could get by with a small hard drive of 40 MB and 4-8 MB memory, both of which are upgradable. It would be nice to get a fax-modem too, because the telephone is so expensive. 

I realize you want an IBM style clone system, and they’re probably much cheaper, but if you should happen to come across a Mac system, Vinz has a Mac LC, and we can give you all the software and fonts you need. IBM’s highly touted Windows ’95 operating system (it runs the machine—you can’t get computers that run solely off program disks anymore) is merely a rip-off of Mac’s operating system invented circa 1989.

I don’t know if Dave’s sent you his photos yet, he’s been meaning to. Dave’s been working long hours on the “swing shift” (getting home at 2 am) in order to “buy” his grandfather’s house—an unscrupulous unrelated cousin managed to get her name included on the will and by California law, if property isn’t specifically bequeathed, it goes to whoever’s on the will. A real mess for him, but at least he’ll eventually own the house in Nicasio. 

The irony is that his so-called “inheritance” house will cost him about the same as if he were to buy it on the open market! But it’s a sweet old house—fraught with structural problems. That’s why he could relate so well to the problems of your house in France. 

(Do you think this is a long enough P.S.? I’m obsessed with filling the entire page with writing, I abhor the blank page in a letter, squeezing in as many words as possible, thinking I’m somehow getting my money’s worth at the Post Office. I know it doesn’t make sense, this obsession of mine, that’s why it’s so difficult for me to write letters—because once I get going I can’t stop! Enough already!!!)

November 22 - to Dec. 31?, 1996 

Journal fragments, Amsterdam, Brugge, Laon

Journal fragment: 19 Sept., 1996 (midnight insomnia)

Home, I am—and after a week of sunshine, I need dark glasses—unused as I am to so much concentrated light. The weather’s turning cold. Fingernail moon (and a total eclipse on the 26th—the last one of the millennium.)

Still suffering from acute jetlag & tunnel vision, disorientation by late afternoon is typical (6 PM is really 3 AM—and I wonder why I have no appetite for dinner!).

Driving is excruciating (asleep at the wheel is a reality). My cousin Dave’s having the same symptoms. We may have jumped into this culture/time zone but the bio-rhythms aren’t yet shifting. He said “I have to keep moving around, flapping my arms, just to keep awake at work.” I laughed at the idea of Dave flapping his wings in an airplane hangar with all those dismantled 747 planes.

At a lively Brazilian party in San Francisco, I made the mistake of sitting alone on the couch for a few minutes. My eyes may have been open, but that’s all. I couldn’t even speak, let alone understand the Brazilians’ Spanish (who speak with a Portuguese accent).

I drove Herman Berlandt & Verona home to Novato in Marin County, north of San Francisco, literally cross-eyed, thinking “I’ll never make it home” (an hour and a half’s drive) so I slept on their couch.

They say it takes a minimum of 1 day of suffering for each time zone. I remember how it took me weeks to recover from Russia. How long will I suffer this time? Someone said that in a Concorde jet, you travel so fast, you hypothetically arrive before you leave—earlier, that is, in New York than when one leaves Paris! Where’s Einstein when you need him?

In August, my cousin Dave Dinsmore came over to Amsterdam to visit me—he works for United Airlines—Dave, Charles McGeehan and his girlfriend Bertaijn and I went to France for a few days—

We took the coast route from Rotterdam to Zeeland islands—dunes marsh and grey sea—and the ferry at Vlissingen to Belgium. I saw the windmill and had that curious sensation of collapsed time, remembering our mad walk to the train station, wanting to visit Wim Hofman but we had so little time, having stopped overlong in Middleburg.

Dave was so amazed, we wound up staying overlong, and had to hurry to Brugge—which was even more amazing—we were so exhausted, we spent the night (in an inn) beneath the tower on the main square.

We got caught in horrible traffic in Lille—no road signs on the freeways, so we circled and circled the countryside for hours trying to avoid the toll roads and navigate our way east by following topographic clues and a certain slant of sunlight until dusk overtook us;

Lille, a real hellhole. Dunkirk ever to the west. The Battle of the Bulge was fought somewhere near here. You can still feel the ghostly reminder the blood-soaked fields at sunset when the light is right and the fog rises up like apparitions.

We wound up several times in a village where Reblais was born, Proust too. Closet hysteric Charles McGeehan forgot his passport (and his epilepsy pills) so we didn’t want to get caught up in a immigration control lines.

Dave and I, having no French money, didn’t want to take the toll roads. Asking a Frenchman directions in a village square was a farce worthy of a Monty Python comedy sketch. Only Bertaijn spoke French.

A 6-hour trip from Amsterdam to Laon took us nearly three days. Kafavy said the journey, not the destination, matters. On the way back, we stopped off in Antwerp; sat in the afternoon sun in front of that glorious Gothic cathedral quaffing strong Belgian beer. We earned the sight of spires piercing the blueness of sky.

Odd, Laon’s hill fortress Gothic cathedral has no spires, just stumps.

I was able to spend some time at a friend’s dilapidated country house in France, in a tiny hamlet of Rogny on the Abbey Road (founded by Irish monks in the Dark Ages) between Marle & Laon, in Picardy, Ainse.

Charles (Bert Schierbeek’s translator) McGeehan’s exwife/girlfriend, Bertaijn’s farmhouse needs so much work, I’d love to stay there next summer in exchange for working on it—it reminds me of my grandmother’s house where I grew up in Forest Knolls.

A certain angle of light, red roses splayed against a wall, farm machinery from another era strewn in every nook and cranny. Triggerpoints of memory.

Charles is an interesting character, a GI stationed in Germany in the late ’60s, on furlough, who never left Holland; he’d met a Dutch girl on a train: Bertaijn. Now he’s 60 years old, an expatriate, neither wholly Dutch nor American.

Bertaijn was Bert Schierbeek’s sister-in-law; we met at Bert’s funeral my first day in Holland in June. We were 500 strong, the coffin, a barge dressed in flowers and sheaves of poetry—including our own Mother Earth Journal. Bert used to spend time at Bertaijn’s farmhouse. My cousin Dave & I felt his presence there. . .


1 Dec. Sun. I’ve been reading up on my ancestors, the Celts—I discovered that Laon (where I was in France) was an Irish monastery until ca. 1500 to 1700 AD.

My favorite mystery scholar whom I know little about, a founder of many of the continental universities, was Johannes Scottus Eriugena (or John, the Irishman b. 810).

He taught 25 years at Laon and at the Paris Court School for Charles the Bald (when he wasn’t being accused of heresy—which was often—for his radical doctrine preached the concept of free will. Note: this was long before Luther was a gleam in his great-grandparents’ eyes).

Here’s a little story about Eriugena: An emperor (Charles the Bald?) made a playful pun on two similar sounding words in Latin: sottum and scottum, and asked John what’s the difference between a fool and a Scot (Irishman) to which John replied, “Only the table.” (In Latin, of course: Quid distat inter sottum et scottum?). The king must’ve been seated across from the Irishman. I bet he was flabbergasted by the answer—talk about turned tables!

But then it is said in our myths, satire was the first art form invented in Ireland. I found this gem in my friend Vinz’s flat: Adversus stultitiam pugnare nil est laboriusius nulla enim auctonate vinci fatetur nulla ratione suddetor. Which goes something like: nothing is more laborious than to fight against stupidity for it won’t bend to any authority and it won’t be convinced by any reason. He must have had some very challenging students at Laon University!

I’m in the process of applying for an Irish passport (my grandparents left before Ireland became a republic, so I’m the last generation allowed to apply for a passport.) My uncle John was in Dublin this summer and got his inside of two weeks.

The passport allows us to work in the European Community, an important consideration. I guess I’m tired of having to always struggle to find work each year, with no future, retirement, or security—nothing at all, for this is the life of an “independent contractor,” outside the system, so to speak.

This is life in America for the struggling artist. Brains and talent account for little in the land where the greenback dollar is God. I think I’d like to work at one of the American schools in Europe—Poetry, English & Art. I want a life where I can spend time in Europe, as I am always unhappy to return to the states, where I need to earn money.

My 2nd night home, I was invited to a Sebastopol Arts Council meeting for the promotion of poetry in west Sonoma County, and I felt so jaded. “Been there, done that. Got the shirt. . .” Guess I should be glad poetry is so “in” but it just makes me bad-tempered and ornery—especially when they dream big, and haven’t a clue as to what goes on in putting on reading series and workshops, wanting more volunteer labor to make it happen. . .and I’ve got that shirt too—in several sizes. (And it’s got bloody holes in it by now!).

It feels a bit like a mausoleum here, in this poetry mecca of the world (and in my cabin too). I know I’ll grow used to it soon enough. I saw a bizarre English movie, The Draughtsman’s Contract, by Peter Greenaway, the director of The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover. At the end there were all these Dutch references—someone speaking Dutch which I could almost understand. It had the peculiar effect of making me homesick for the wrong country.

They say you always leave a part of yourself behind when you travel. Does that mean there’s less of me returning home each time I go away? (Hemingway said: Travel broadens the mind. Writing broadens the ass. I write standing up.)

Before I left Amsterdam, I got into a bicycle accident. As I was returning home to Oetgenstraat from Westerpark, some idiot took a curved wrought-iron flower trellis (the arch that goes over a gate) out of the back of his double-parked car on Prinsengracht (near Utrechtstraat), and swung it in front of me, cutting my right hand.

I tried to protect my face but smashed into a parked car, bruising my left wrist when I hit the back windshield. It was either smash into a parked car or fly into the canal—which to choose? The bike’s brakes were no good on wet cobblestone & brick.

I’ve been ignoring my wrist for the past 2 months—until it hurt so badly (I was smashing a clove of garlic with the flat of a knife; the little bones in my wrist made a crunching sound like potato crisps!).

I went to the doctor who put it into a splint to rest it—a bad sprain with injury to the ulnar nerve. I’m a slow typist wearing a wrist brace which looks (& is beginning to smell) like an old gym shoe, and as winter’s chill creeps in, my bones ache; injuries don’t heal quite as fast as they used to.

Amsterdam, journal: seeking light 7/8

Yesterday I met with Paul Evans at the Café Winkler, but it was closed and I was late, having miscalculated the distance. I am sitting in the sun on court Prinsenstraat, having left my new address with Marcel Koops. I was going to invite him to dinner last night, but there was no answer. So I left a message with Vins as well.

Paul was more entertaining, he got my new number from Charles McGeehan. And so we met up yesterday afternoon. I was so happy to see him that I'm feeling a bit scandalized, especially since I took a couple of days to write a long passionate letter to Waldo, half in Spanish, my first Spanish love letter, inviting him to come visit. But hey, he's married and life goes on in the streets of Amsterdam. I certainly prefer the views of Westerpaark and the Jordaan to the industrial area where I now live.

Paul and I went out to the Soundgarden, and he rode me on the back of his bicycle, sidesaddle. I found his face haunting me last night. The way he looks at me so intently is a bit unnerving. His eyes follow me, even in sleep.

Last night I banished his image from my eyes, saying, I don't want to fall in love with a poor young Welsh poet and translator living on the dole in Amsterdam. I'm trying to strike the matronly older sister approach, and nothing untoward has happened. I've only met him three times, but somehow we're we've covered a lot of ground.

And what of Waldo Rojas, snug in his petit bourgeois existence in Paris with the wife and position at the Sorbonne. A man not crazy in love enough to come when I call, for what I want is a man crazy enough to chase me through Europe, or at least through the streets of Amsterdam.

The glass sausage tourist boats patrol the canals, the narrow-eyed tourists categorize with commercial eyes, the inner vulva of the city. They've come to the right place to spend their guilders. A glass boat with a banquet table set with shining crystal and silver amid the snowfields of Irish linen, and where are the guests? The menu: tourists under glass.

Paul and I sit on Marnixkade in the Jordaan district, watching the ducks and mudhens. He notes that I'm hyperactive. And I tell him there are times when I break down and don't even answer the phone. He doesn't know it's because I'm nervous, afraid of the silence that fall between us like an ax to sever this tenuous connection, afraid of where it might go, afraid of where it might go. Foolish, and afraid of being vulnerable.

I sent on a canal bench where no one knows me, writing on the absurdities of love, knowing full well that Edwin Drummond might be waiting for me upon my return, and I'm not sure if I want him. Second time around? I don't think so.

The woman at the petticoat shop lets me have a turtleneck sweater, a scarf and two antique nighties for only 15 guilders because I'm such a good customer. The shawl perfectly matches my jacket. I bought it there in 1993 and she actually recognized it. It's a cold summer here this year, and I want my longjohns to sit in the sun that does not warm the skin.

Paul has lived here for six years, when he isn't mooning over an ex-girlfriend or two. Am I to be added to that list?

As for poetry, he is a purist, having read the modern poets. He can quote at length any poem. And he writes and measured beats, he knows the syllabic structure, while I can't even diagram a line, as he so aptly notes. He queries me how can you write in iambics when you don't even know how to measure a line?

I answer, I physically walk my poetry, I speak English, my body knows the rhythm of language.

He said, I wanted to know what's happening first, that's why I studied structure. Of course, structure is nothing without the emotion of the poem. He pays very careful attention to his craft, his poems are beautiful, and they take my breath away.

I tell him gull is a Cornish word and we have a Celtaholic attack, deciding that everyone who writes poetry is a Celt, regardless of their racial background. I tell him that poet is a maker of truth in the various Celtic languages, but it means liar in the Germanic languages. There you have it.

We talk of prosody and whether or not it's possible to lie within a poem. Sometimes the lie within a poem points to a greater truth. We don't mean the lie within the poem is a lie, but the construct of a poem itself is a lie. In this manner, three hours pass, what's to be the outcome?

We make tentative plans to meet at the Winston kingdom tonight. He's to make a chapbook of the readers to be out in a fortnight. And I am caught up in his accent, unfamiliar, but not quite, and the words that I might not use. He says I hee-ard and I answer I usen't to, or amn't I. Our little Celtic works pepper the English syntax of the enemy.

Paul grew up in a village of 8000, in the Rhondda Valley, a former coal mining valley in Wales, and spent most of his time hill-walking in the forests and vales of Wales, somewhat like me. I still live in the country, while he has traded the Welsh countryside for the low lands, low.

I tell him about Irish mythology, and he tells me of Gaulish history, how Caesar slaughtered an entire Helvetii tribe. Men, women, children, 40,000 of them, and later, another 80,000. We agree that the Roman Celtic genocide predates the English attempts.

Paul talks about the first Gaulish group in Britain, the ginger-haired Goidelic speakers. I counter with the Celt-Iberian migrations. And we we argue over P Celtic and Q Celtic languages.

I hold out my long hair, saying, Look at us, we could pass for cousins in a policeline. We're dark-haired Celts, but our hair, look at our hair, it's fire red in the sunlight, even though it's dark. He confesses to having an Irish grandmother. I say aha. I have many ginger-haired cousins.

I ask, What does this all mean, the British are quick to appropriate us if we become famous. Take Joyce, Francis Bacon, or even Samuel Beckett—which leads us on a lively chase to Catullus and Virgil. Celts writing in the tongue of the oppressors.

This is where the life of all poets as being Celts comes in, he says. I ask if I'm born in the US, and you're born in Wales, and if we become known as writers in Amsterdam, who will claim us, the British, the Dutch? To whom to whom do we belong to and owe allegiance, as poets. Ancestry and nationality. We are poets of the world.

I walk home along Prinsengracht observing the beautiful light. When I came upon the Amstel River and the Magere Brug, the skinny bridge made famous by Van Gogh, on Kerkstraat, I thought to myself, you have to earn this view to really appreciate it, and walking this far I really did earn the view. My payment was exquisite light trapped on water.

And I thought to myself as I peered down Utrechtstraat, Vins is right, this city does have its hold upon me. What does it mean? I recognize the buildings and the light from my dreams all right, this mythical city, I dreamed of it long before I ever visited here. Was I a Sephardic Jewish refugee hidden here in a past life, a factory worker, or a street worker? Poet.

Waldo calls me at Charles' house, and I'm surprised to hear the news.

Amsterdam Journal: Sarphatistraat 7/7

7/7 1996 Amsterdam, Sarphatistraat

Ah, what I've always dreamed about, a balcony with full morning sun. Sunday morning, little traffic. A sea of rucksacks and well-wheeled luggage clatters over the cobblestones like the hooves of cart horses. The next wave of tourists from Japan has arrived. 

I'm house/cat-sitting at Dave Hansen's flat, a few doors down from Adam and Eve Avenue on the F17 tram line, a low-budget hotel, of course. 

First sunny day in Amsterdam. What to do?

Somewhere someone is whistling a Nat King Cole song, a full deep-throated whistle. Okay to listen to outdoors that is. Not like Herman Berlant's thin reedy trill that drives me crazy within seconds. On my own, shall I wander through this wonderland alone? Play Misty for Me becomes my instructions for the day. After a shower, I find the sun has nearly abandoned me again.

I was awaken by cramps at 7 AM, not enough sleep. I worked on a letter to Waldo Rojas in Spanish most of the night. It takes so long to write a letter in a language not my own, when I have to look up every fifth word for spelling.

Herman commented about a woman who learned in several languages by having lovers from different countries.Yes, well, one is motivated in a different way than in school. 

As I mended my flowered dress, I got my first phone call from a Welsh poet Paul Evans, wanting to go out for coffee at the Café Winkler at 2 PM. I'm going mad from sirens and trams, the incessant city noises are so irritating. Sarphatistraat, at the intersection of three different tramlines is noisy. And the woodpigeons are eating the cat food. 

At Charles McGeehan's house, it was quiet, but living in that chaos was more than I could bear. I am glad to be out of that place.

Sunshine to the east, Stornes clouds to the west. Seagulls over the Amstel River portend a storm, or so they say. Paul tells me that gull is a Cornish word. His lilt is so different than the Irish, but definitely related. He didn't grow up speaking Welsh and so he's not got all the cadence. 

A sudden squall turns the wheel of the day into night.