Leaving Rotterdam

Morning on the river.
The ferry eases out
past the practical edges of the city,
past glass, steel, cranes,
past the white lift of the Erasmus Bridge
curving over the water
with its one deliberate sweep.

The flag at the stern keeps changing its mind.
Red, white, blue,
then only color in the wind,
then cloth again.
Everything here is in motion
even when it seems fixed.

Rotterdam does not give itself away.
It is not old stone and bells,
not the staged romance of a place
already translated for visitors.
It is harder than that,
more exposed.
Built up again out of damage,
out of trade,
out of the stubborn intelligence
of people who live with water
and do not trust it.

From the deck
the buildings lose their height quickly.
They flatten into light and pane and angle.
The bridge holds for a while,
then it too begins to thin
against the pale distance.

I watch the skyline
do what skylines always do
when you leave them:
become arrangement first,
then outline,
then an idea.

And yet some cities do not shrink at once.
They keep their pressure.
A turn of river.
A gleam in the glass.
The severe beauty
of structures made not to charm
but to stand.

What stays with me is not grandeur.
It is the water taking everything into itself.
The mild slap at the hull.
The white bridge opening and opening again
as the angle changes.
The sense that departure
is less dramatic than people say.
A city does not plead.
It recedes.

Still, something in me resists.
Not enough to stay.
Just enough to feel
that leaving is a kind of unfinished looking.

Behind us
Rotterdam enters weather.
Blue-gray now,
with strips of sun caught in the windows.
Ahead, the river broadens
toward elsewhere.

The flag keeps working in the wind.
The wake folds and loosens.
The city, nearly gone,
remains for a while
in the eye,
then in the mind,

where certain places go on existing
with more precision
than they had at the time:

a bridge like a drawn line,
water under morning light,
and the brief, unprovable feeling
that while passing through
you were, for a moment,
exactly there.