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Het HuisAuthor(s): THOMAS MCGUIRESource: The North American Review, Vol. 293, No. 2, The National Poetry Month Issue(MARCH-APRIL 2008), p. 39Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41220238 .

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N A R

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Het Huis THOMAS MCGUIRE

By then day had broken everywhere, but here it was still night - no, more than night.

- Pliny the Younger's description of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the fumes of which killed his uncle, Pliny the Elder.

In Holland eighteen is the legal age for working whores. Sitting in her display window, a meisje from a former colony cups and circles her ebony breasts. Barely eighteen, the girl yawns behind her spotless shop windowpane. I glance at her, then at my daughter. I can recall what I knew at eighteen but wonder how much I knew at eleven. Kelsey pretends to ignore the drab. "Papa, how much further to Anne Frank's house?" I change the subject: "Have you ever read the word prostituta"

Rain falls from a day-and-mortar sky that, for weeks now, has shrouded Amsterdam like a winding sheet. Though the calendar says late June, the air feels like fall. Rain every day this month. And in the street, all I hear beyond the harlot's cry is talk of global warming, immigration blight, and the price of petrol.

We can't find Anne Frank's secret annex, her refuge called het achterhuis. Lost and out of place, my daughter and I keep walking. On Prinsengrachtstraat, we skirt offal: shattered beer bottles and condoms lie on cobblestones like so many shards of spent lust. Down below the quay, in the stew of a slime- green canal, Amstel bottles and frites wrappers rock and bob in the clash of barge wakes. And last night at dinner, my queer leftist friend from Maastricht told us Amsterdam is vies gewoorden . . . just dirty and shot to hell Twenty years ago, he called my rich, conservative friends from Harlem fascists. Besieged now by this "filthy" postmodern tide, they all defend Pirn Fortuyn's ultra- right assault on "backward Islam" and say, Holland isn't what it used to be -

they've filled it with their drek and decadence.

And I whisper to myself what an unkind memory it is that only glances rearward. Still I can't help but cast back to 1982, a summer when I wandered for hours along these canals, enraptured by their green waters - grachten waters and canal banks that then seemed so leafy- with-love. I knew my way around. But in the chill of here-and-now, I'm dazed and out of place. We keep circling these canal rings, passing heroin

addicts and dozens of boy tricks as they stand waiting, shivering in a slant of rain.

Kelsey peers into the downpour. The low, joyless sky moves me to consider the time of our demise. When will we die ... five, ten, thirty, fifty years? Still waiting for Kelsey to answer my question, my thoughts turn to some poet way across the ocean who keeps churning out well- measured verse about everything but the actual mess. Why does no one write any more like Pliny the Younger and his uncle Pliny the Elder, that most Roman natural historian who said, " Vita vigilia est... to be alive means to be awake"? That was before Vesuvius got him. Pliny the Younger, both nephew and protégé of the Elder, recounts what killed his uncle was not a fifteen-hundred degree tide of bloody lava. Curiosity and the gas got him.

I repeat my question, holding the sad notes of that strange word a little longer: Have you ever read the word pros-ti-tute? Kelsey squints through tiny spectacles fogged by the damp. She shakes her head. When we turn a corner we find het achterhuis, then climb like pilgrims, curious to see the half-lit attic where the little Jewish author kept her own vigil, letter by strange letter, until she too was dragged into the dark. □

self-degradation. Economic markets, built upon the assumption of rational, self-interested consumers, are institu- tions ill suited to restrain addicts built on ever-greater overindulgence, even unto death.

If America is "addicted to oil" (and for once, George W. Bush is completely correct), we will need to seek help; kicking the habit will be painful; and restraining our cravings will not be easy. Somehow, we will have to reach deep into our republican and liberal traditions for the strength to struggle

March-April 2008

against what we have become. America's rich cultural heritage contains the elements of help we will need in the years ahead, for the truth is there is a citizen, a consumer, and an addict in all of us. It is both our patriotic duty and in our self-interest to take steps to achieve, not independence from foreign oil, but independence from all oil. Some first steps might be: ( 1 ) including big SUVs in the Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFÉ) standards of cars (in effect, outlawing the Hummer, Expe- dition, Yukon and other gas-guzzlers),

(2) stopping virtually all new highway construction and redirecting money from the Highway Trust Fund into infrastructure repair and building of alternative transportation networks, (3) increasing the Federal gasoline tax by at least fifty cents a gallon to provide additional funds for alternative projects and to relieve some of the pain to those who our addiction has placed at risk (like truck drivers who deserve help with their diesel fuel), and (4) ceasing

Continued on page 47

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW 39

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