After millenniums
of fallen needles
and cones the size
of huge snails
the Hage Veluwe
offers ground –
moss like
punched-up quilts.

Needles still hang
in elegant strands, hair
adrift on Utrecht breeze,
their trunks shifting
back and forth
their sea of jade like heroin
or brothers on heroin
afloat on the same
dream.

Light does not
illuminate.
It simply
charges lichen
into bursts of lime
eerie pubis mounds
soft and glowing.

Don’t bother
to pick up underwear,
the dropped laundry
of winter.
A limb,
a finger like a girl’s
bends downward
cluttered with jewelry,
hard knots of pine,
and dips its tips
back into hair.

Slow curves
of air stir
enormous firs
against enormous firs.
Their darkness grows tall
above Amsterdam’s,
the city of nightly strolls
and swallowed herring.

Walk St. Annenstraat’s
scarlet path of women
where panties glow
blue with black light
and hips
are so young
you taste them.

Quickly, sweetly
they push open the
door
and call you in.
Toilet. Bed. And Sink.

Gently, quickly
they let you steer
your longing.
Flesh’s softest leaves
and young cones
coiled around seed.

There, the long tossing
back of limbs
become soil
where dreams lie down
then punch up,
still steaming.

Where sisters
of heroin bend, soft
and thin
toward the earth,
the taste of salt
still glistening
on their lips.