This is Anna writing. Heed me. I traipse and stretch across an ocean.
I of Amsterdam, once married to Jan Hoekstra, wildly comic sculptor of assemblages, scattered across a yard on the flattened outskirts of my city, afflicted by multiple sclerosis, grappled with a walker, vast sexual appetite in his prime, shorter than I, so strong, wanderer through canals, tipsy cyclist, crashing often, once off a bridge into water, the bicycle recovered amid his bold laughter, later struggles with his walker to attempt once more to sculpt a weightless form, defying his own incapacity. Falls.
Helen Rice and I hoist him up to a futon, we a dalliance then, sexy crones to creative crones, sweet Jan dead hours later, grieving him still.
And I of upstate New York, they call it here, grief that spans an ocean, spouse now of Helen, in a triple wedding among Jan’s sculptures, imagining him in his do-rag and beard laughing as we six or eight or then ten, it was, of us, dance like Bojangles, jump so high, then lightly touch down. The electric stand=up bass and classical guitar of Eindeloze Tijd, Endless Time, we Moroccans, Dutch, Americans, lightly touch down, yes, and in one grand leap, jeté, I cross an ocean to a land of mountains and winding rivers and slate outcroppings and hardpan, fierce winters now disturbingly warm. An alien. Displaced.
Though less perturbed, breaking outward, like the dancer, the potter, the roamer of Amsterdam streets, picking up men, women in my youth, then transformed to sedate, a pose I matched for awhile with behavior, usually, often, then Helen and I meet. We make love. She tarries, we marry. Breaking outward in a new land. How it must be.
