One time I wrote a poem about the Netherlands. It’s all about how I took the train from Amsterdam to the sea. I wrote about the green fields and the men in those fields walking their dogs. I wrote about the grazing sheep. I wrote about two old brick farm homes and how the pale clouds ploughed across the sky above them. I wrote until I reached a small town called Zandvoort pressed up against the North Sea, a popular place in the summer.
Zandvoort Beach is mostly empty, the buildings that line it boarded up for the season. There are sand dunes with tall grass. A father and mother play with their daughter in the gentle surf. A woman walks her golden retriever.
In the poem I wrote I am alone, and I am an invisible American. My phone is a rolodex of pictures of the distant turbines piked into the bed of the North Sea.
In Oosterpark, men with no jobs play tennis all day on a court in a shady corner of the park. I watch the mechanics of their bodies as they smash the ball over the net. Sometimes other people watch but I am invisible, like I said.
In this poem I have a partner, and this is how we break up. I go to the sea. I go to the park. I say goodbye to my thirties. I walk past a Holocaust memorial (they are everywhere here). I walk down my favorite tree-lined street. It doesn’t make a difference if I am alive or dead. Seriously. This is the kind of midlife crisis you can have when you are 42.
Inside the gates of Oosterpark the fountains in the ponds spit water high into the air. Men get drunk on benches. They have no jobs and nothing to do.
Back in the poem, the town of Zandvoort is empty. I see the last ten years of my life with her laid out behind me as flat as the North Sea on this afternoon. The North Sea is my friend, the turbines are my friends, the green countryside with grazing sheep and men and their dogs are all my friends. Finally, the father and mother and their child playing in the gentle surf are especially my friends.