AIDS Memorial Day, Amsterdam
Why did I come?
The music’s good—Rachmaninoff, Haydn,
Copland, Strauss—
but the officials’ speeches drone too long,
are all in Dutch, so I can make out
not one word.
My mind wanders, rehearsing the few
local expressions I know—Daag, Alstublieft,
Dank u, Spreekt u engels?—
and thinking about regional specialties like
rijsttafel, hutspot and pannekoeken,
beers like Oranjeboom,
and then the man in the seat before me
starts to cry. This is a language I can understand,
one we all begin at birth.
He’s quiet about it, but his beard’s filling with tears,
dark estuary grasses rustling as
the full moon whispers in high tide.
His shoulders shake, and I want to touch him,
to show him tenderness is not
extinct.
Suddenly the speeches stop.
The auditorium fills with silence,
and now begins the naming of the names.
Their voices are fireflies: all that darkness, and then
a brief spark here, there, there:
David, Jan, Michael, Susanna.
Each grief speaks its center, its black wick.
Votive candles placed one by one
in a shrine’s box of sand, each
singularity melting down
till the wax commingles.
The man before me speaks a name
I don’t understand, cries harder.
As the service ends, he disappears into the crowd,
the hundreds pouring up Damrak
bearing white balloons.
We march silently, silently filling the square
before the Royal Palace, where
the bell tower’s carillon begins.
Our balloons bob like babies’ womb-pale brows,
a sea of the hopeful, the newborn,
and, at the first notes of “The Rose,”
together the balloons ascend,
bearing the names of the dead,
losing themselves in azure,
an orchard’s gravity reversed.
As if apple petals did not flurry down
to scatter grass
but rose slowly into sky.
--Jeff Mann
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Jeff Mann has published five books of poetry, Bones Washed with Wine, On the Tongue, Ash, A Romantic Mann, and Rebels; two collections of essays, Edge and Binding the God; a book of poetry and memoir, Loving Mountains, Loving Men; six novels, Fog, Purgatory, Cub, Salvation, Country, and Insatiable; and three volumes of short fiction, A History of Barbed Wire, Desire and Devour, and Consent. With Julia Watts, he co-edited LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia. The winner of two Lambda Literary Awards and four National Leather Association International literary awards, he teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech.