Drawing by Beatriz Crespo
Berlin Variations
… blue slows slate & dark, limns the building’s edge just desire, a vapor trail deep to west no birds, the ticking of a clock that’s not a clock, no lights, not yet, no talk, not yet, on a couch the sky it slates & buildings roofs & trees the tones could be mid-autumn but no, almost solstice already, windy head, no one cared, not then, not now, still what got lost & when, on the snowy side of a street, cold buildings cold book in hand inscribed in colored pencil no myth but those imagined & those at best misunderstood no one ever sat to the side here on this empty street, in snow, reading a book of broken birds & brittle air by a grove of stone, still, back then, as if another wall winter kept falling hard, sitting on the floor, metal mother cold pietà, blizzarding now beyond the panes, sitting on the floor back then tea vodka samovar hum in the dark between words between worlds in two in the dark dreaming of others &
Postcards stamps starlight & you
in what silences iron-
green canals like veins the heart
sills sudden gusts long in the waiting
I remember small
afternoons’ taut threads or was it
mourning, he said, It’s that
the eyes they’re open kettle-hum to the tune of
plains blown neat I was
a frantic while all the
while colorful faces humaned else-
where, windy
that room of yours a
broken umbrella
& then another, of a kind. You, as a younger man, at a table in a long-gone café, on the corner, facades still scarred & almost always snowing. Long days of dark, or mostly, and waking unsure to when. But on the table there’s a candle, there’s an ashtray, there’s a wooden counter by the door a small bust of the prophetically bearded one & a faded red accordion towards the toilets. At some point in this tableau a young woman will hand you a box of matches & later, back on the street, in another
whiteout you will find every match used will watch every tip crumble to the touch—for you went through them all—& later still will not find her at the bar she said you might but at the moment it’s just a little box of matches between your fingers & you are at a table or one of the worn sofas, picking at the threads, in a café, just below the street. It’s good enough, especially as it doesn’t exist, except here, when you step through the door, brush aside the heavy red curtain & one two three down
ALEXANDER BOOTH is a poet and translator who lives in Berlin. Recent translations include books by Friederike Mayröcker, Alexander Kluge, Gerhard Rühm, and a new translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. His collection of poems Triptych was published in 2021 and Kantor in 2023.