In the second volume of my cousin’s (actually my great-grandfather’s
          cousin’s) novel
of growing up in Netherlands, Haarlem N. Holland as an orphan
          apprentice painter
of carriages he is sent on errand to carry glasses on a hexagonal tray on
          his shoulder
through de Dreef right near the haarlemmerhout, the town woods now
          become park
I walked almost every night I was there the last time and still is
          surrounded by a line
of free standing houses, really mansions and then goes out Heeren Weg,
          gentleman’s
way to Molenaarslaantje, Miller’s Lane because otherwise the marble
          painted glasses
will cut too much into his shoulder and this is the easy way I realize
          that Molenaar is
the family name of my son’s wife who originally from Haarlem migrated
          in WWII
to S. Africa in the form of her father’s father, her paternal
          grandfather and I think
well, the miller, this guy who grinds the flour in his mill must always
          have tended to
do well and live out in better part of town while my Van Looy crew
          were the tanners
scrapping the dead skins of animals and dipping them in these stringent
          curing dips
toxic concoctions of preservation (and what they wrote on for centuries
          when the col-
lapse of the Roman Empire cut off the flow of cheap papyrus/paper) and
          here on paper
in cousin’s book a Van Looy character is walking in the scrub trees along
          the dunes &
and I’ve just been learning over and over playing a song Deze Zee (this
          sea) which on
Youtube.com has a video of the North Sea coast and I’ve just been to all
          the places that
cousin Jacobus is talking about going to and there he is walking on
          a long Molenaars-
laantje the family name of my son’s wife’s patriarchal line what coinky
          dinky happen-
stance synchronicity strikes again again deja vu all over the place
          serendipity zippedy
                                      zippedy do-da, zippedy do-da day-ray
                                                       WAY

 

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.