I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.
~Stephen Vincent Benet

The city seeps into my blood,
but the apple-eating bears of Montezuma
still frolic in my dreams.

*

We linger under the eaves
and gables of the grachthuizen
while Rembrandt’s dark eyes watch us
from his seventeenth-century frame.

*

In this country of coffee and concrete,
I have almost forgotten the paths
where like pilgrims we walked
ankle-deep in stars.