Proof That We Were Here

Lyrics

I found your entry, Landlubber Lenny.
The man who fished bicycles from the Prinsengracht.

You feared the water, they said.
The green-black slide of it against the brick.
Every morning, the flat-bottomed sloep, the smell of diesel and wet rust.
Your long hooked pole, pulling up the skeletons of commutes.
Fifteen thousand a year, you'd say. Locked and rusted shut.
One time, a goldfish, still alive in a front basket.
A small, impossible orange flicker in the muck.
You kept it in a jar by your window.

But the box of your own proof, Lenny…
You took that to the deepest water.
The Puerto Rico Trench.
Eight thousand meters down.
You let it go.
What proof remains that we were here?

Just a shoebox, weighted with stones.
Full of paper ghosts.
Ferry tickets from 1998.
Cinema stubs from the Pathé Tuschinski.
Two seats, always.
The ink already fading before the salt could take it.
A deckhand on a charter out of San Juan helped you.
Said nothing. Just watched it sink.

The box of your own proof, Lenny…
You gave it to the deepest water.
The Puerto Rico Trench.
Two degrees Celsius at the bottom.
You let it go.
What proof remains that we were here?

At eight hundred atmospheres, paper implodes.
It doesn't drift down like a memory.
It becomes a wet, silent ping.
The ink, a cloud no one sees.
The story, just pressure and cold.
The proof is gone. The love is gone.
Is the memory the same as the proof?

Up in Amsterdam, another bicycle comes dripping from the canal.
Down in the dark, nothing.
Not even the ghost of a ticket.
Lenny.
What remains?