Missing Carnival

O Venlo, Venlo, stedje van pleseer. This time

her body made him think of countryside,

some figure from his childhood, sun on scythe,

wind blowing shadows across the shining barley,

the milk-pail dented from use, the smell of leaf-mulch

and leather in the tack room. Soon she’d take bus

and ferry from London to Belfast, but first

the fire in her bed-sit. Her fingers traveled too,

down the raised purple scars along his vertebrae,

the flannel sheets between her thighs, his hair

trailing along her abdomen, the quill

of a feather poking through seams of the comforter,

the comforter itself. Those scars—he’d lied

to her, his time in Nicaragua, thugs cut

him coming from the fields. The bloodier fight

was with his brother, slicing tines of a pitchfork

plucked up along the flooded Maas. Everything

reduced to trinket and anecdote, the beer

and facepaint of carnival, street-dance and tuba,

beyond the muddy English roundabouts, the brown

and white waves, yellow lamps along Dutch highways,

his work at the union office pinned beneath

a glass globe paperweight—shaken

it showered silver snow over the wide

straw hat, red and green plow, the slouching body,

a campesino from days before Somoza fell.

He wondered if she were any better, smuggling

French social theory into Ulster, encounter

groups in the rec-centers of tower-block basements.

She’d just gotten the news: her last lover died

in a fire along the side of the highway, body

broken in seven places, silver chrome,

pearl and gold gas tank scorched, his bike crumpled

beneath the husk of an overturned van.

There wasn’t much to talk about. Afterwards she lay

with her back to him and he sang her carnival songs

in a language she didn’t speak, O Venlo, stedje van

pleseer. He thought of himself as the sun, kissing

her neck at the hairline, turning grey cobblestones

of the town-square silver, marshaling parades.

Source: Bridge and Tunnel (WordTech Communications, 2007)