Berlin Duration

by

Carson Richard Butts

Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours in German and Spanish, University of New Brunswick, 2004

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

in the Graduate Academic Unit of English, Faculty of Arts

Supervisors: Demetres Tryphonopoulos, PhD, English Sharon McCartney, MFA, Creative Writing

Examining Board: Randall Martin, PhD, English, Chair Ross Leckie, PhD, English

External Examiner: Allan Reid, PhD, Culture and Language Studies

This thesis is accepted by the Dean of Graduate Studies

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK

April, 2009

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•+l Canada ABSTRACT

Berlin Duration brings the many photographs of my albums, recollected mental images and collected facts, emails and clippings to my readers so that they might glimpse the city as I lived it and feel it as I felt it. This is an auto-biographical long poem, a "rag-bag" of poetry, prose, image, metaphor, lists and bent truths. It takes the nostalgic bull by the horns. As I move through the city, catalogue cobblestones and experience and relive the love affairs of friendship, I grapple with the heart of nostalgia's disrepute - sentimentality. This is not a complete or even accurate portrait of the city of Berlin; rather, it is my Berlin, 2003 to 2006, my Berlin duration. Influences on this work include

Wordsworth's "recollection in tranquility" and the long modernist poem, especially

Pound's "rag-bag" and Williams's Paterson. The "found object" in this poem is everything.

11 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my two supervisors on this thesis for their constant support and advice. Thank you, Demetres, for showing me how poetry means and for being the first to tell me that I should consider doing an English Master's. And thank you, Sharon, for putting pressure on my lines and never getting too academic.

Thank you also to Ross for putting the fear of sentimentality in me, and to my external examiner, Dr. Allan Reid, for taking the time to read my thesis and for everything he has done throughout my UNB career.

Endless thanks, love and smiles to my family. Thank you, Dad, for showing me how to get this poem started; Mom, for listening to me talk all the tough bits out; Carla, for your infinite confidence in me; and, Adrian, for all the breaks and distraction.

Finally, I thank my friends, in Canada and in Germany, for taking part in this poem, for enduring and enjoying my countless stories of Berlin.

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. ABSTRACT ii

II. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii

III. TABLE OF CONTENTS iv

IV. INTRODUCTION 1

V. BERLIN DURATION 19 1. Airplane lands 21 2. Leaving homeland 22 3. First night on Wrangelstrasse 23 5. Oranienburgerstrasse 25 6. A Room Without English 28 6. A Room Without English [English translation] 31 7. Reichenbergerstrasse 59 - meeting Claudia and Christoph 34 8. Claudia I. 38 10. ^4 rippling in the glass 40 11. Marilyn Manson Concert 41 14. Esther 44 17'. Meeting Antje 48 18. Antje I. 50 18a. I woke up in Berlin 53 18a. I woke up in Berlin [English translation] 54 24. Krossenerstrasse 7, Friedrichshain - moving in 55 25. Friedrichshain 58 26. Krossenerstr. 7 to Oranienburgerstr. 61 27. Much dearer things - 1.12.04 69 30. Prenzlauer Berg 72 33. Going Home for Christmas 79 43. Tod 82 47. Krossener 7, Friedrichshain — moving out 83 48.Kreuzberg 84 59. Shades of Blue 97 60. Lovelite courtyard, EuroCup '08 98 68. Berlin exists 99

VI. WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED 101

VII. CURRICULUM VITAE

iv 1

INTRODUCTION

I have composed a long poem titled Berlin Duration on the city of Berlin,

Germany and my experiences while living there from August 2003, to August 2006. The poem contains most of what I know and believe of poetry and, in so doing, demonstrates my own idea of poetry, its form and content, which I will attempt to elucidate in this introduction. Though I cannot fully define, or even outline, my long poem in this short paper, it will be helpful to first summarise my understanding of what poetry is, based primarily on my studies of Modernist poetics and criticism, and some of Modernism's predecessors.

William Wordsworth defined poetry in 1802 as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings...from emotion recollected in tranquility" (260). William Carlos

Williams said of poetry in a 1957 interview with Mike Wallace, which Williams subsequently grafted into his long poem Paterson, that it is "language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized... A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately" (Paterson 221). Pound defines poetry as "language charged with meaning" (Perloff, Poetics 226). In thinking about my poetry and Berlin Duration, I combine these three statements into one: Poetry is a separate little universe built from recollection of powerful feelings and charged with emotion and meaning.

Furthermore, everything of our physical and emotional worlds can constitute materials for poetry. Whitman draws "everything" into the universe of Song of Myself early in the poem, Book 3, when he states, "Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul" (24). Of Whitman, Pound writes: "I honour him for he prophesied me while I can only recognize him as a forebear of whom I ought to be 2 proud" (Early Writing 187). Pound expresses this same all-inclusiveness in his prose essay "The Wisdom of Poetry": "Poetry is the expression of imaginative thought...to which end all animate, inanimate and intangible things may assume the properties and attributes of tangible, living, thinking and speaking things, possessing the power of becoming what they seem, or of transfiguration into what they suggest" (Early Writing

190). The universe of poetry constitutes, therefore, an act of discovery, made first by the poet and again by the reader. Accordingly, Whitman's poetry demonstrates American

Frontier thinking in which the discovery lies always over the next hill; the poet striving constantly forward and relating everything in his path to his reader in pursuit. Darryl

Whetter sees this very tendency in Williams's Paterson, which "acknowledges the placement of ideas in things as a process which, like the writing of a long poem, is necessarily endless" (259). Appropriately, Williams had only begun composing Book VI of Paterson before he died in 1963 (MacGowan, Paterson xii); Pound's Cantos is an incomplete long poem into which the author strove unto death "to make everything fit"

(Bacigalupo 25); and Whitman proclaimed in Book 1 of Song of Myself, "I, now thirty- seven years old in perfect health begin, / Hoping to cease not till death" (22). Likewise,

Berlin Duration is incomplete, organised loosely according to chronology with many gaps in numbering of its sections. What is presented is a piece of the story, largely auto­ biographical, pieces of the universe I discovered over three years living in the city and fragments of visits afterward.

Berlin Duration is my attempt to bring the many photographs of my albums, collected facts, recollected mental images and "powerful" feelings contemplated after- 3 the-fact, charged with emotion and meaning, to my readers so that they might glimpse my experience of the city as I lived it, and feel it as I felt it.

This introduction proceeds in four sections which build on the above explanation of my poetics and influences regarding the content and composition of Berlin Duration.

Section one explains how the poem's lists and catalogues become artistic and poetic through the choice and intention of the writer. Section two is a discussion of movement through time and space in my long poem and in a selection of long poems influencing my own. I make note of the inclusion of movement and/or stasis in the catalogues of these poems, as well as the use of epanaphora for cataloguing movement and stasis. In section three, I argue on behalf of nostalgia as a motivational tool for recollection and reproduction, taking into account Eliot's "objective correlative" as a means of evoking emotion in poetry. This section concludes with my analysis of certain particularly nostalgic passages of my poem and how I attempt to avoid sentimentality. This analysis leads into section four's methodology of restraint against sentimentality through control of lineation influenced by James Laughlin's "limiting metric," and concludes with a demonstration of Williams's "lineation as guide to meaning" and "visual patterning" in my poem. This introduction concludes, as the poem concludes, with an assertion of

Berlin's existence as geographic location and history regardless of this writer's experience and story, or those of others. I summarise the intention and challenge of this poem as a balancing act between nostalgic sentiment and objective reporting.

My assertion that everything belongs in the universe of poetry presents Berlin

Duration with the challenge of being all-encompassing, an impossibility partly to blame for the long poem's necessarily endless nature. I have drawn from my reading of great 4 examples of city poetry such as Williams's Paterson and Frank O'Hara's poems on New

York, as well as Alfred Doblin's modernist city novel Berlin Alexanderplatz which draws upon James Joyce's Ulysses "as a source for Doblin's writing style, with its rapid shifts between interior monologue, collage of quotations, and montage of fragmented details"

(Stephan v). A passage from Doblin's novel most closely reflected in my own poem is found early in Berlin Alexanderplatz on page 32 where specific details of a tram line are given, including stops and pricing:

Car No. 68 runs across Rosenthaler Platz, Wittenau, Nordbahnhof, Heilanstalt, Weddingplatz, Stettiner Station... The Three Berlin transport companies - streetcar, elevated and underground, omnibus - form a tariff union. Fares for adults are 20 pfennigs, for schoolchildren 10 pfennigs, reduced fares allowed for children of up to the age of 14, apprentices and pupils, poor students, war cripples, persons physically unfit for walking as certified by the district charity offices. Get to know about the lines.

My section 26 mirrors this passage in its listing of stations (44-5) and detailed description of travelling by Berlin city train. An important question worth asking in regards to listing of details and/or objects as in the above prose of Doblin, and even more so in the more restrictive line and prosody of poetry comes up in Williams's quotation of the 1957

Wallace interview in which both men agree that a section of a poem by Williams is "a fashionable grocery list" (Paterson 222). Wallace then repeats his question, "Well—is it poetry?" to which Williams answers, "We poets have to talk in a language which is not

English. It is the American idiom. Rhythmically it's organized as a sample of the

American idiom. It has as much originality as jazz." He continues shortly afterward with the following statement: "Yes. Anything is good material for poetry. Anything"

(Paterson 222). This refers back to my assertion that everything belongs in the universe of poetry and Bacigalupo's statement that Pound's poetry sought "to make everything fit" 5

(25), turning the poem into a "rag-bag," as seen in Pound's own words from Ur-Canto I:

"But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks, / Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the thing's an art-form, / Your Sordello, and that the modern world / Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in" (Early Writing 145). However, intentionality is importantly at play here. It is essential that Pound was trying "to make everything fit" and that Williams sees "anything [as] good material," even as he notes specifically that it must be organized rhythmically, in as original a manner as jazz (Paterson 222). I address this concern and am in full agreement with Williams and Pound in section 30, using an anecdote of garbage dolls rather than, but not dissimilar to, poetry:

Jana had filled the room with her dolls made from scraps, junk perhaps, but reconciled through re-use. Hagen, Claudia and I went to see them, bottle cap eyes, potato chip bag dresses, mini cereal box bodies, but they didn't look like kindergarten crafts and I cannot say why. Speculate: they were made on purpose, each piece carefully selected, diamonds in the rough, no messes of glue, teacher telling her not to put it in her mouth, Jana made these, she chose to do this, saw life in the kitchen bin and created art. (57)

Jana's intentional selection of diamonds in the rough, or in the kitchen bin, is what made her dolls art. The list Williams presents in the poem questioned by Wallace; my listing of train stations (44-45) and other elements of taking the train; and Jana's junk for creating dolls are all good material for poetry and art because of the careful selection process which Ezra Pound refers to as "the method of Luminous Detail, .. .that is, the method of multitudinous detail... The artist seeks out the luminous detail and presents it" ("I Gather the Limbs of Osiris" 21-3).

There is unavoidably and by necessity a personal quality to the selection of diamonds or "luminous details," based on the artist's perception and personal preference 6

or choice. In my long poem, the observation and listing in the city sections, such as 3, 5,

7, 18a, 24, 26, 30 and 48, remain objective relative to the auto-biographical storytelling

of other sections; however, through personal interjections by the speaker, an emotional

investment between speaker and Berlin arises throughout the city sections as well. Berlin

Duration takes into account the physical and emotional composition of the speaker's

surroundings, as well as the spatial and temporal movement of the speaker through city

and experience - left and right, backward and forward.

I have recorded the composition of districts, streets and apartments in numerous

catalogues and lists throughout the poem. Section 5, Oranienburgerstr, begins with the

first line's catalogue of the interior of the restaurant A ufsturz, including the candle holders, the service, the frowning servers and pretty servers, the square tables and

artwork for sale on the walls. The end of line five continues the catalogue with food and

drinks available on the menu (5). Lines of this section are unusually long, each one

wrapped by the right margin of the page one to eight times. This line length attempts to

reflect and contain the scope of Oranienburger Street's many stimuli: buildings, people

and street life. The comparably long lines of section 30 and long, but not wrapped, lines

of 48 do the same cataloguing of the city districts of Prenzlauer Berg and Kreuzberg,

respectively, followed by shorter vignettes of the speaker's experiences or memorable

moments in these parts of the city: "Take a compass, the sharp point at the bottom of U

Eberswalder steps, trace a radius of 500 metres, perfect circle within which moments

spring forth" (54). The act of observation takes precedence over movement in such

sections, influenced by many long passages of Whitman's Song of Myself. As in

Whitman, moments are detailed in temporal stasis within a defined area or district. 7

Whitman's Book 33 begins with the exclamation, "Space and Time!" (49); the capitalisation implies the abstract concepts of Space and Time as the cataloguing, though full of movements on the part of its constituents, takes place in all Space and Time rather than through either. These catalogues are therefore relatively static. The speaker is loafing in the grass, laying in bed or walking the beach while producing a long catalogue, in the first half of Book 33, of animals and occurrences in nature listed in epanaphoric lines beginning with prepositions: "Where," "Over," "Upon," "At," and "Through" (49-

52). An earlier example of cataloguing in stasis is Book 15, a catalogue of the diverse peoples of America, "The pure contralto ... / The carpenter ... / The married and unmarried children ... / The pilot... / The mate ... / The duck shooter ... / The deacons

..." etc., ending with the city and people asleep, "And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, I... I... I And of these one and all I weave the song of myself' (32-35).

Whitman weaves Song of Myself 'from lengthy, detailed catalogues taking place in

America with little expression of physical movement or passage of time affecting the speaker.

For the purpose ofBerlin Duration's inclusion of movement as well as stasis in its sections, I compare Whitman's static catalogues to a most recent long prose poem by

Canadian poet Jeramy Dodds, Glenn Gould Negotiates the Danube in the Company of a

Raven (2005), which is a catalogue of the desperate forward movements of the speaker's group, giving the impression from the second clause onward that they are being pursued:

"we were chased off the lake by the crooked elbows of a thousand swimmers" (1). No matter the peril, they continue on through painful circumstances on every page: "you come in and slit your shin on the corner" (2); "they made their way on our splayed limbs" 8

(3); "we sailed on a sea under the soil" (4); "there is enough distance to break your eye open" (5); "At night we mimed our way out of that mess" (6). Even at rest, "[they] slept

... like puppies in a sack tied to a tailpipe" (2). Forward movement is ceaseless and takes great precedence in Dodds' poem. Berlin Duration features movement by necessity, both in search of fresh, new stimuli and as a means of travel through the city. Section 26 is a strong example in which the speaker travels on foot, by tram and by city train from his apartment in an eastern district of Berlin to the restaurant Aufsturz near the city centre.

Without overt desperation or pursuit, the stanzas combine the speaker's travel, "Twelve minutes on foot... I... I No time, I take the tram past the jewellery shops, cafes, / and recycled clothing, past Gabriel-Max Strasse ..." (42-3), with much observation of his surroundings on the street or out the window of the train:

Hackescher Markt is ritzy, we meet there only with money though we have none, and I walk by only on my way from Alex to Friedrichs- and Oranien- burgerstr. where I am now headed. S75 onward and I leave the well-dressed Berliners on patios below to their espresso macchiatos, their tapas, their cocktails. Irish pub slips my mind, under west end of the station, three rooms, warm, affordable, thunder overhead. (47)

Ginsberg's Howl influenced my writing of Berlin Duration greatly with regard to line length, epanaphora, and the combination of movement and stasis. Section I of his poem describes "the best minds of [his] generation destroyed," and the temporal and spatial movement over time through America and toward this destruction in long, epanaphoric lines: "the best minds ... I... I who bared their brains ... / who passed through universities ... / who were expelled ... / who cowered ... / who got busted ..."

(9-10), etc. This destruction culminates in section III, at which point all movement has stopped and Ginsberg, addressing Carl Solomon, asserts over and over, with continuing epanaphora, "I'm with you in Rockland" (24-6). Epanaphora, as a rhetorical device, allows the long poem to incorporate sweeping catalogues of movement and stasis, of animate and inanimate objects, making of itself an indispensable poetic tool.

Another important element of my poem to consider, which I will argue is a vital motivational tool for recollection and re-creation when composing poetry, especially of an auto-biographical nature, is nostos. I suggest a combination of Wordsworth's and T.S.

Eliot's methods of expressing emotion in poetry. Wordsworth explains that "emotion recollected in tranquillity ... is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind" (260).

This concept of producing the original emotion is found also in Eliot's search for an

"objective correlative," which is "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion, such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked," which Eliot asserts is the only way in which emotion can be expressed in art (Eliot,

"Hamlet and his Problems" 100). The methods of both poets seek to produce the original, experienced emotion once again in their reader through poetry; to produce again is to reproduce or to recreate something which has existed before and therein lies also the wish of nostos: to return to a time or experience of the past. Nostalgia, from the Greek root nostos, is therefore a key tool of both recollection of emotional outpourings, and later creation of emotional equivalents. It is the nostalgic wish to return that drives a writer to recollect, interpret the past and create emotional equivalents in the present act of writing. This is especially true of auto-biographical writing that shares with nostalgia a 10

desire to return to an earlier point in one's life. It is important to remember, however, that nostalgia has a negative reputation. Ross Leckie explains that "it is closely related to the

saccharin and sentimental, and an entire industry of greeting cards has been built on this mush" (2). This was certainly a risk as I perused my photographs of Berlin, read my journal entries of the time and remembered friends with whom I have lost touch; however, this recollected material served as vehicles to nostalgic contemplation by which, careful to avoid Hallmark mush, I am provided with visual and emotional cues, as well as motivated to a necessary level of concentration which in turn sharpens memory's

image.

Leckie re-evaluates nostalgia in his paper on Jan Zwicky's poem, "Brahms'

Clarinet Quintet in B Major, Op. 115," in which she writes, lines 8-15:

That the mind's light could be filtered as: a porch, late afternoon, a trellised rose, which is to say a truth in nostalgia: if we steel ourselves against regret we will not grow more graceful, but less. (Songs 13)

Leckie acknowledges "how the poem provides aesthetic shape to nostalgia and regret.

The syntax is extraordinarily restrained and simple, almost defiantly so" (2). The images

filtered into the poem by Zwicky's mind are reminiscent of the sentimentality of the 19th

century, but Zwicky makes a case for their value in that they are true, and I support this

assertion of truth as the sharpening of the mind toward this truth through nostalgia. For me, this sharpening of the mind is the distillation of past images from my time in Berlin,

for Zwicky "a porch, late afternoon, / a trellised rose." 11

Still, Zwicky takes up again nostalgia's desire for return in "Cashion Bridge," a poem appearing later in the same collection, in which she reveals the impossibility of return to the past:

I miss the old boards: this version of the bridge is new ... / [...] But this isn't what I meant to tell you either. What I wanted was the walking, not the walking-to but the not-getting-there, the every moment starting out... / [...] that held breath between the future and the past that's neither, but is still the only place we'll ever be arriving to, the only place it's possible we are. (Songs 44)

However strongly we wish to return to "the old boards," however often we begin walking toward recreating an equivalent of the past, we are caught "between the future and the past" in "the only place it's possible / we are" - the present. This denial of nostalgia's wish is also a refusal to succumb to nostalgia's temptation toward saccharine sentimentality, which is a refusal for which I have striven in the particularly nostalgic sections of Berlin Duration.

I will voluntarily point out sections 8, 27, 48 and 59 of Berlin Duration as particularly nostalgic due to their longing for years and friends past, and I intend to defend my embrace of nostalgia only as a tool of memory which I used with care not to wish for return or succumb to regret. The first three address losses of contact or closeness with friends. Section 8 ends with "my preferred roommate" (28) Claudia moving out:

And as we carried your belongings down to the truck in manageable cotton shopping bags, I imagined you staying, 12

but never told you, our correspondence opaque, happiness expressed, not felt. (19)

I show that I imagined her staying in that present moment, but do not express regret that she did not stay. Similarly, I never told her of my imagining, but do not state that I wished I had. Explicit expression of either the regret or wish connoted in these lines would have fallen prey to the negative reputation of nostalgia.

The long strip section positioned on the right of the page in section 27 is a lament for Krassi, a friend who is now "a / name on my screen that / never responds" (51). I have attempted here to stick to concrete details of that time remembered, referring to him as

"buddy," "a name" or "friend" without emotional modifiers; however, I admit to running the greatest risk of sentimentality in this section above all others, and even I am not convinced that I have been entirely successful, having used such a phrase as "Oh Krassi / it is you I miss" near the opening of this strip (51). I also refer to him as a "handhold when Berlin / became too vertical and slick," but feel that I have succeeded here in subverting the overtly emotional image of holding hands with the metaphor of rock climbing.

Section 48 is the longest of the poem: it concludes with an actual email that I have reproduced on page 77. Just above the email, at the top of the page, is the conclusion of a story about Mohammed, who had gone for good when I returned to Berlin in the summer of 2008. To him, I have written a much shorter strip:

I wanted to call, ask about his artichoke heart, order a Berliner and his drinking companionship though he only drank tea. I think of you in Feb., Mohammed, save a free bit of counter, 13

let me know where you are.

I ask him only to let me know where he is; the image of a heart is subverted with

artichokes; his friendship attached to drinking and incongruent, for I drank beer and he

drank tea. The desire to call was in the present moment; there is no regret at not having

called, nor is there over-sentimentality in thinking about him in February, as I spare all

unnecessary detail. The final line of the section, immediately following Bettina's email which shows that I may have missed an opportunity to receive the love I had been missing, displays my agreement with Zwicky's demonstrated impossibility of returning

to the past events and the refusal to succumb to that desire: ".. .1 still haven't written back" (77), although the "still" leaves some possibility for weakness.

Finally, section 59, titled "Shades of Blue," takes place back in Canada and

expresses overall a desire to return to Berlin without stating it outright. As I have been

describing, this is a most important technique for avoiding Hallmark mush - the refusal

to state emotion outright. As Eliot explains, one must "[find] an 'objective correlative' ...

the formula of that particular emotion ... external facts, which must terminate in sensory

experience" ("Hamlet" 100). Only the formula and proper termination might be used;

restraint is essential. I have used "my bluest blue" as an obvious substitute for "my

saddest sadness" that I might not make it back to Berlin, but defined in the same line as

"my bruised belief instead (78). The section further details some differences between

Fredericton, Canada and Berlin, and implicitly expresses my wish to return; however, the

last line asserts my resolve to remain in the present: "I'm fattened up for the coming kiss

of cold, blue winter's lips" (78). The fattening refers to my preparation not to return to

Berlin; winter refers to Canada and the present, where I shall stay, and, in an 14 unexpectedly foreboding and elegiac metaphor for the cold, kiss of death, I point toward the possible permanence of my departure from Berlin, this long poem's object of desire.

I feel it also necessary to address the varying shape and line-length of my poem and how that variation is directly related to the level of observation vs. emotion, objectivity vs. subjectivity and passiveness vs. strain, three spectrums I view as closely related and co-dependent. I have already explained the long lines of sections 5, 30 and 48 as necessary in an attempt to reflect and contain the scope of the respective streets' and districts' many stimuli. I have also touched on the emotional restraint of the short-lined, strip poems of sections 27 and 48, to which I will now add section 14. My influence for this restrained line length is the poet, publisher and critic James Laughlin, who wrote for part of his career in his own invented "limiting metric" or "visual couplet metric," explained by Laughlin:

The rule is that in a couplet every second line has to be within three spaces of the line preceding it. Now that is unquestionably the most artificial metric that the mind of man has ever devised but it suits me. I'm able to get from it the kind of tensity I want between a free-flowing prose cadence in the poem working against the strict architectural discipline of this narrow column of lines, (qtd. in Tryphonopoulos 341)

Tryphonopoulos explains that Laughlin "counts not syllables but characters and spaces

[which] is radically and conspicuously even more restrictive" (341). I have also been able to "get from it the kind of tensity I want" in its limitation of line-length and, by

association, of words used, which has assisted me in limiting the complexity and detail of my images and metaphors through passages of high emotional intensity and potential nostalgic sentimentality. I have been better able to hold myself to the first two principles

of Pound's Imagiste movement: "direct treatment of the 'thing'" and "to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation" (EW 252). Although I have not been 15 as strict as Laughlin - the lines of section 27's lament ranging between the 20 and 30 characters of the second last and last lines, respectively - by restricting the line and straining to treat the "thing" directly with only the sparsest concrete details and language,

I have felt confident in entering the realm of emotionality in my poetry without producing

Hallmark mush. Laughlin summarises this intention in his foreword to Poems New and

Selected with a poem exemplary of his "limiting metric":

SOME PEOPLE THINK

that poetry should be a- dorned or complicated. I'm

not so sure. I think I'll take the simple statement

in plain speech compress­ ed to brevity. I think that

will do all I want to do.

Tryphonopoulos points out other elements of Laughlin's prosody in relation to

Williams's, which I also admire. For example, "on one hand, Laughlin follows Williams in his rejection of regular rhyme, meter, and syllable count..." (341). As demonstrated by his own "limiting metric," Laughlin does not, however, follow Williams entirely, and

I find it important to show where I rather follow Williams's lead: "On the other hand,

[Laughlin] deliberately refrains from following Williams in such matters as the use of lineation as guide to meaning, asymmetrical typography, visual patterning, and technopaignia" (Tryphonopoulos 341). Like Williams, I make use of lineation and visual patterning as a guide to meaning in Berlin Duration, from which I will briefly list a few more examples, in addition to that which I have already explained regarding my longest lines for scope of stimuli, and the shortest, "limiting" lines for moments of intense 16

emotion. My long poem is generally aligned tightly to the left margin of the page; any

break of this trend is a significant indicator of meaning, demarcating a brief change of

speaker as in section 7, where the only stanza shifted in its entirety by one tab from the

left margin occurs when my first Berlin roommate Lars briefly becomes the speaker of

the poem (14). Greater tabbing away from the left margin indicates a sudden break from

the running topic or emotion of a section, as in sections 27 and 48. Throughout the poem,

words or sections in italics most often denote a switch from English to the German

language, a quotation in either language, or less often a brief interjection by other

speakers. Finally, the stanzas of section 26 appear as somewhat consistently sized,

rectangular blocks, roughly half the page in width, one following the other in an effort to

represent and resemble the tram and train cars of Tram 23 and S-bahn 75 in which the

speaker is sitting and making his observations.

The act of composing this long poem has been, for me, a multi-faceted exercise in

discovery and observation, recollection and interpretation, cataloguing and recording,

lineation and restraint. For the reader, I predict that my poem shall be a similar discovery,

in and of itself, without necessarily having visited the city of Berlin. For the reader, my poem is a discovery of fragments of the whole experience which is, like the long poem,

endless and unfinished; this explains the gaps in the numbering of my sections, of which I have planned roughly seventy in consecutive numbering. Even once the seventy are

complete, it will never be possible for a reader to attain my experience in full by reading

the poem, since much depends upon and remains fragmented by what I have chosen to

report, as well as how I have interpreted and altered the truth while observing and

cataloguing through the personal lens of perception and memory. 17

The final point I wish to make in closing is that same point revealed by the final section of my poem:

Berlin exists

as location as geography in the stories of others as history, physical and otherwise, without me: (80)

Berlin exists as a geographic, physical location; it exists now and probably for over 800 years of our history to date (Dr. Arndt Cobbers 7), regardless of my experience, my story and my writing. Berlin exists also in the experiences, stories and minds of countless other individuals, a dozen of whom are represented by quotations of their writing following the eight short lines (including the title) of my final section; but Berlin exists without them as well. I therefore cannot claim to offer a complete or even accurate portrait of the city of Berlin. This poem is, rather, my conscious effort to communicate the physical images seen in my photographs of Berlin and those images I call forth from memory; it is my separate little universe built from recollection of my time in the city and my powerful feelings pertaining to that time, charged with newly produced emotion and meaning which I hope to convey. This poem expresses my personal experience and reaction to the city; it seeks to produce an emotional equivalent in the minds of its readers whether or not they have been to the city; it attempts to explain the desire and importance

I personally feel for the city and to create in the minds of its readers that same sense of

Berlin as an object of desire; it walks the line between my reality from 2003 to 2006 and my recollection of it at the time of writing in 2009. The writing that follows can be 18 summarised as a balancing act between my nostalgic longing for Berlin and my objective reporting of the city.

I give you my Berlin Duration, now read! 19

Berlin Duration 20 21

1. Airplane lands

People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation. Walt Whitman Song of Myself

Alight from sky over Berlin-Tegel,1 rubber touch tarmac, tire-burn, scream like a whistle announcing game's begin and I step off the plane and stop.

I stop behind slow-moving line of debarkees disembarked once flight stopped flying, we inch toe-lengths toward "stop and wait here" customs barrier. Stop for my bags, stop at lost luggage, stop to call mom at rest on phone back home. Stop in wait, stop and wait, stop and notice for first time the city moving beyond airport doors. Entrance or exit to world, jacket unfastened, zipper down, traveller barefaced, unconditional. Lids open, eyes focus, planted heels now turn, take me to designated smoking area where even those in a hurry take time to pause, smoke, stop and plan the next move. My next moves: Tegel Airport Bus 128 to U-Bahn 62 - 9 min.; wait 5 min.; U-Bahn 6 to U-Bahn 1 - 18 min.; wait 4 min.; U-Bahn 1 to my stop - 7 min.; walk ca. 500m, ca. 7 min. to my new building. 50 minutes to where I pull off my jacket, think, "Here I am in Berlin," recall the trip, the first leg, and await the arrival of my bags.

1 Berlin international airport in city's northwest. 2 Berlin subway line 22

2. Leaving homeland

Im Jahr 1932, als ich im Ausland war, begann mir klar zu werden, daB ich in Bdlde einen Idngeren, vielleicht einen dauernden Abschied von der Stadt, in der ich geboren bin, wurde nehmen miissen. Walter Benjamin Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert

In the year 2003, while abroad, it became ever-clearer to me that I was taking leave for a longer, if not prolonged, perhaps lasting, period from my homeland. The town of my birth lay so far away, smooth green hills of Alberta north, eight time zones and seventeen years - my birth twenty-two years - behind me. I grew up at patchwork of locations, Canadian dweller on Prairie, Shield, Maritime, across ocean, over earth and through the air by plane. I miss you - a familiarity - whom I have never known but for whom I reserve place in years yet unlived. Where I meet you, where you will catch me if you can, is around the corner I am walking toward and the street names are yet out of view - my searching eyes peeled. Homeland came not to mind until I felt I wasn't there and now, over five years from my arrival abroad, homeland is not the same place - solve one Rubik face while the others transform in my absence.

3 In the year 1932, while 1 was abroad, it began to become clear to me that soon I would have to take prolonged, perhaps lasting leave from the city in which I was born. - Walter Benjamin. Berliner Childhood Around 1900. 23

3. First night on Wrangelstrasse

High ceilings, 12 foot, rough wood floor creaks, phone and doorbell wires, strung but not taut, along corridor's cracked gaps between wall and ceiling. Apartment creaks in answer to convenience store chatter below, misunderstandings between two languages, no translation available.

You are him! Yes, I am. And you translate everything, Lars, a problem, I am here to learn German.

In my room, broken bed frame, no mattress, previous roommate had no need for the frame, you say, as if that clarifies more than splintered wood and stripped screws. But you provide an air mattress, I'm grateful, for my bags have not come and there will only be two, one with clothes and toiletries, the other only books. Air mattress in a box, you hand me a foot pump, Hurry! I have made tea in the kitchen!

Your room appears untouched, framed portraits of dead textbook faces and small ivory heads adorned with ivy. Wall of books floor to ceiling, a collection you're working on, I can see it in dusty library room, storage. White foam sofa but no bed. No bed? It's in a roll, in your closet.

Bathroom's larger than necessary, long tub, washing machine, toilet, sink, window ledge and dozens upon dozens of tiles unstepped-on. Smaller bedroom in previous life? Walk-in closet before plumbing walked in? Toilet flushes, yeah, standards, but

hot water is broken in the kitchen, water heater a box clinging, two of five screw holes above the sink, wires loose and/or cut come out the side, Worked half the time before the landlord half fixed it, he 11 be by tomorrow or the next day or the next. That sink more a shallow metal bowl than basin, one bucket from bathtub fills it, and hot bath water for tea, boils faster than kitchen's cold faucet.

IKEA wardrobe turned food cabinet, top's mine 24 but we can share flour and spices if you cook; I don't. Table unsteady, cutlery at odds, 1 coffee mug, 3 glasses, 3 plastic plates and 2 ceramic. I have an extra wine glass in my room if you ever need to borrow it, just ask.

My door closed, foot pump asks: Is this the way it is here? Standard apartment? Average guy? My girlfriend visits from Dresden, says, NO! How should I know? And she begins circling Roommate Wanted ads in the papers.

I lived on first floor there, only time before and since, put my finger on it, that's what I missed. From window sill I could almost touch tops of passerby heads, store front chatter was not German, but Turkish. And, Lars, that was it, my first Berliner, first roommate, you didn't speak German to me, I didn't care about the place.

I never saw you again after end of that month. If you see this, I'm fluent now, come find me, we'll speak in any language you like. 25

5. Oranienburgerstrasse

Leave Aufsturz5 behind, its candle holders disappeared under mountains of bulbous wax, its slow slow service and the frowning servers, mein Gott, so viele Ausldnder, die konnen kein Deutsch, und die hubsche Studentinnen mit der en ich sowieso keine Chance habe,6 and the pretty servers with wonderful bums walking away from me, weaving around square tables as if there were no sharp corners, and the artwork on the walls of faces stretched vertical, stretched horizontal, always sepia and deep rouge, eyes black and white, peering, staring, every piece for sale, dangling price tags from dark frames. And I don't go home tonight for I am here, in der Oranienburgerstrasse, wo alles durcheinanderkommt, wo die viele Verschiedenen sich vertragen und einfach alles passt, alles geht, was geht ab?, na hier immer was - this is true. Oranienburger Street, first meeting place, first year, first approaches - Gabri and her garlicky, Polish expressions, Typhaine and her topless, French self-portraits, Krassi and his passport, Eastern frown, Geraldine and her ethereal, vanishing presence like a cloud. We walked up and down the street as Touris , as Europder - category so large it means little and I included myself even before realisation that I am one, I am Europder, I am Canadian und ich bin em Berliner1''. The street runs from Friedrichstrasse at its west end to Hackescher Markt hardly one kilometer to the east and at night the devil is in the details and here he is: Get off the U6 at U Oranienburger Tor, one station north of Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof, come up to street level at the west end with your back always to McDonald's, please, and begin eastward. The street looks like the world and all its languages and palm trees: Spanish tapas11 bars, Indian curry houses, Japanese minimalism rolled in rice paper, East Berlin graffitied facades, Italian pizza and soda, American cocktail bars, and halfway down, at the corner of Tucholskystrasse that cuts the Oranienburger in half is Aufsturz on the right with its baked potatoes, its chili, the Schweinebraten12 is delicious but the bottles of Radeberger and Gambrinus13 are cheaper.

4 Oranienburger Street - main 'nightlife' street in Berlin Mitte - slightly north in centre city 5 restaurant on Oranienburger and Tucholsky Street 6 my God, so many foreigners, they cannot speak German, and the pretty students with whom I have no chance anyway 7 on Oranienburger Street where everyone mixes up, where all the Others get along and everything simply fits, everything goes, what's goin' on?, well, always something here. 8 German slang/abbrev. for "tourists" 9 European (n.) 10 and I am a Berliner - when JFK visited Berlin, he famously made the mistake of direct translation and proclaimed, "Ich bin ein Berliner," the "ein," however, changes the meaning of "Berliner" to "a jelly-filled doughnut," or Pfannkuchen in some areas of Germany, and Berliners have never forgotten and always loved JFK for it. '' Spanish hors d'oevres 12 German fried pork chop 13 popular beer brands of Germany and the Czech Republic, respectively 26

Put food aside and there is Tacheles 4 - art house of post-punks, ex-squatters, grunge artists welding metal into robots and giant rusted orange words like FURCHT, LIEBE, KIND, TOD, KUNST,15 eight feet tall in the open courtyard out back. Tacheles, not a wall left bare of spray paint inside or out, and the gallery interiors where Gabri and I rolled cigarettes and drank the artists dry of Zywiec16, their smoky canvases more twisted than Guernica17 in colour, but costing less than their worth, just enough to cover another white square with paint. Tacheles, HOW LONG IS NOW, not a question but constant thought since the bombs dropped on this previous life as Weimar-upscale-department-store, gave it new life, life to which I must return, because Tacheles stands alone, alone on the street amid parking lot, power lines, and the rest. So continue past this art house on the right, look left at a moment of kiosks and cheap Doner, proceeded by chic cafes, orange fluorescent lit, and low black leather ottomans, and the palm trees begin, everything 'authentic' marked by palm trees, Berlin northern and grey. In the pedestrian crowds, hear the exclamation marks: "I fuckin' love Berlin, man!" - "You can smoke everywhere here!" - "Where's the pub crawl start!?" - "No one speaks English! I can say anything I fuckin' bloody well like! And I can fuck any one of these birds19 as well!" - "Na du Wichser! Mich darfst du aufkeinen Fall, auch wenn du genugend Kohle hast!" ° - "She's talkin' to you mate!" - "Ja ich rede mit dir! Und doch, aufder Oranienburger spricht alle Englisch, du Schweinr The girls between parked cars identifiable, their fanny packs (AMER) (or bum bags (BRIT) - important difference considering slang) and corsets in common, pants like second skin, and long, perfectly straight hair. The girls of the Oranienburger are high-end as gold-plated mirrors in the Indian restaurants, as cashmere scarves hung on ivory coat trees, as gelled business attire on the leather ottomans, and these girls close in, allure, attract with make-upped smiles and what they'll do for 50 Euros in 20 minutes. Particular kiosk on northern sidewalk where Krassi and I bought bottles of Flensburger and Krombacher22, sat at picnic table outside the door under Marlboro Light umbrella and smoked our Gauloises and Lucky Strikes. The store owner placed a single sweet candy - lichi, starfruit or mango - on every bottle's cap and we thanked him, knowing he remembered us. And in summer, we took our bottles further down the street, past Aufsturz because this was our second year now, Gabri and Typhaine gone, our money gone, we had nothing but time, nothing else to spend, Krassi procrastinating his thesis, me

14 the name of this large building, home to several art galleries, a cinema, two cafes and a bar 15 FEAR, LOVE, CHILD, DEATH, ART 16 popular Polish beer - Many Berliners travel one hour east to Slubice, Poland for cheap cigarettes and alcohol. 17 the painting 18 Turkish kebab 19 British slang for women 0 "Oh you jerk off! Not with me, no way, even if you had enough cash!" 21 "Yeah, I'm talking to you! And yeah, on the Oranienburger everyone speaks English, you pig!" 22 German beer brands 27

avoiding thoughts of assistant teaching and girls from whom I had run, we crossed the Tucholsky with our heavy, clinking, stretching plastic bags and stopped at Monbijou Park, on benches, popping caps off our bottles with the butts of our lighters, setting fire to smokes and taking long drags. We had no money to give, so the beggars gladly took our empties for the Pfand23 and they'd love a cigarette to boot. Across from that kiosk, a parking lot framed by Tacheles's plain whitewashed facade to the west, backdrop for a giant painted face in negative black and white over which those words: HOW LONG IS NOW. And the Diesel Wall to the east, its ever- changing mural with a message, for the longest time, this wall cried out DESTROY SACRED WORDS and the two stenciled columns like slabs of the Ten Commandments five storeys high for all to read:

I think this could only be here, in this city, on this street. Why in English? Why so crude? Why? Why? why'' Why to do as it says, to shock, numb, and by numbing destroy significance, and the Oranienburger swallows the sacred individualism of its parts by mashing them together, all except the Berlin Synagogue wondering how it came to be on this street, towering, massive fortification across from Monbijou, and well-guarded as all German synagogues big and small (no violation on Jewish grounds, embarrassment unbearable). The orange brick synagogue of Oranienburg, I know nothing more than its outer shell and the automatic guns of the police at the gate, across the street I stay, in the mash, where I find solace by blending in; on this street, ich bin Berliner24.

deposit money I am a Berliner. 28

6. A Room Without English

Die Miete ist kalt, das Zimmer nicht unbedingt, das ware deine Sache aber wir haben hier Kohlenheizung, bedeudet, wir holen die aus'm Keller hoch, machst du jeden Sonntag, Montag und Freitag, ich und Joachim an den anderen Tagen, wir haben schon gewahlt. Verstehste?

Na gut, Kohlen sind schon hohe Nebenkosten und es nervt, aber das Zimmer ist hell obwohl du zum Hinterhof hinaus schaust, die Wohnung ist neu saniert mit Laminat, das Haus hier Neubau also Ruhe kann ich dir nicht versprechen. Verstehste? Nee, wahrscheinlich nicht aber du wirst sehen...horen meine ich.

Komm mal rein. Bin mir gar nicht sicher, ob's sich lohnt aber, hab schon drei Termine heute gehabt und es kommen noch zwei nach dir, wir geben Ende der Woche Bescheid. Du kommst aus Amerika, oder? Achso, Kanada, du bist also Kanadier, schon viele Seen und Walder, nicht? Weipte? Seen? Walder? Ja... Also gut, rechts ist die Kiiche, alles was man braucht auper Waschmachine, so einen Waschsalon gibt's um die Ecke neben Lidl und Rossman. Die Lage ist ganz gut eigentlich auper offentlichem Verkehr, die Bushaltestelle ist 15 Minuten zu Fu(3 und die Strassenbahn kommt blofi aller zwanzig Minuten aber das weipte ja schon, wie bist du hergefahren? Hmm?

Toilette ist links durch die Kiiche, das Waschbecken benutzen wir in der Kuche 29 und die Dusche auch dort in der Kiiche, also miissen wir so einen Duschen- und Essen- Stundenplan ausmachen, wird schwierig aber naja. Hab ich schon erzahlt, dass Joachim und ich friiher mal zusammen waren? Ja, das hier war unsere Wohnung und dann wir hatten keinen anderen Plan, machten hier aus der Wohnung eine WG. Sollte gehen aber wir schauen mal, nicht? Wir verstehen uns meistens, Joachim und ich, aber mein Gott, mit dem Mann kann ich gar nichts mehr anfangen, kann ich gar nicht mehr...

Also, weiter. Gleich links ist mein Zimmer und danach kommt Joachim, war immer unser Wohnzimmer gewesen. Kannste ruhig reingucken. Die sind groP die Zimmer und hell mit geteiltem Balkon, leider hast du keinen im Hinterhof aber frische Luft kriegst du durch das Fenster auf jeden Fall, wenn du deine Tiir zum Flur offen lasst. Guck mal, am Ende des Flurs rechts bist du, Joachim gegenuber. Klein, oder? Aber du bezahlst weniger. Ist nicht immer so laut im Hinterhof, das Fenster kann so eine Schallmauer sein, wenn es zu ist. Schlafst du tief?

Streichen musst du, wenn du einziehst, das Zimmer blop. Kannst dich freuen, dass's so klein ist und die Decke ganz niedrig. Wir haben's immer als Lagerraum benutzt, kann ich dir sagen, verstehst du mich? M-hmm. Nee, oder? Besser so.

Das Zimmer ist unmobliert. Ach, auch was, keiner ist hier angemeldet also musst du dir selber was ausdenken. Hast du Freunde in der Stadt, bei denen du dich anmelden konntest? Nee, oder? Ach Gott, ich weip ehrlich nicht wie wir zusammen wohnen konnen. Mein Englisch ist echt scheisse und dein Deutsch, ja, ich rede weiter und weiter. Tut mir leid, der Joachim ist heute nicht hier, sonst hatte er uns helfen konnen. Er studiert Amerikanistik 30

an der Humboldt-Uni, keine Ahnung ob er Englisch spricht, aber lesen tut er's auf jeden Fall. Magst du das Zimmer?... Die Wohnung?... Gefallt dir die ganze Sache?... You like?... Oh Gott, ich verstehe sowieso nichts.

Hor mal zu. Ende der Woche. Wir rufen dich an. Ganz viele wollen hier einziehen. Schauen wir mal, ja. Wurde dir gern einen Kaffee anbieten, aber der Nachste kommt, also sage ich ciao. Hier, die Wohnungs- tiir schliesst nicht richtig, es gibt aufm Boden hier ein Brett was die Tiir zuhalt. Heb's mal hoch und da biste.

Gut, wir rufen dich an, ja. Schau mal weiter, ich weip ja nicht ob's hier fur dich so gut aussieht. Bestimmt gibt's was naher an der Uni, mit auslandischen Studenten, oder? Haste geguckt ob's irgendwo in deinem Uni- gebaude Anzeigen gibt? Vielleicht horst du noch von uns, bin mir nicht sicher. Aber viel Gliick und, ja, tschiip, bis dann, tschtissi! 31

6. A Room Without English [English translation]

The rent is cold25, the room not necessarily, that'd be your thing but we heat with coal here which means we haul it up from the cellar, that's your job every Sunday, Monday and Friday, me and Joachim do it on the other days, we already chose. Y'understand?

Okay now, coal is an expensive utility, and it's annoying, but the room is bright except that you look out on the back courtyard,26 the apartment is newly renovated with lino, this building's a Neubau27 so I can't promise you quiet.28 Y'understand? No, probably not but you'll see.. .you'll hear, I mean.

Come in. Not at all sure if it's worth it though, already had three appointments today and two coming after you still, we're letting people know at the end of the week. You come from America, right? Oh, Canada, so you're Canadian, lots of nice lakes and forests, no? Y'know? Lakes? Forests? Yeah... So alright, right is the kitchen, everything you need except for a washer, there's a Laundromat around the corner beside Lidl and Rossman.

This means that utilities are not included. "Warm rent" means that utilities are included. 26 In Berlin, back courtyards of buildings are small and surrounded by connecting building walls on four sides so they are never very bright; however, rooms are nearly always advertised as being bright. 27 lit. "a new-build" which generally signifies buildings constructed after WWII. Buildings from before WWII, especially from the 1920s and 30s without particular architectural form, are termed Altbau, lit. "old- build." 28 Neubau are generally constructed with thin walls. When Germans hear Neubau, they think of sound coming through the walls from neighbouring apartments which rarely occurs in Altbaus. 29 a major discount grocery store chain 30 a major drugstore-like chain with the exception that nothing with medicinal ingredients may be sold; sale of items with medicinal ingredients is only permitted at Apothecaries in Germany. 32

The location is pretty good actually, except for public transit, the bus stop is 15 minutes away on foot and the tram only comes every twenty minutes but y'know that already, how did you get here? Hmm?

Toilet is to the left through the kitchen, no bathroom sink, we just use the kitchen's and the shower's in the kitchen too31, so we'll have to set up a routine for showering and eating, a bit complicated but, oh well. Did I already tell you that Joachim and I used to be together? Yeah, this was our apartment and then when we ran out of steam, we turned our home here into a shared apartment. Should work out fine but we'll see, right? We get along most of the time, me and Joachim, but my God, I couldn't keep it going with the guy anymore, can't do it anymore...

So, let's carry on. Right away on the left is my room and then Joachim's, this was always our living room. Feel free to peek inside. They're big, the rooms, and bright with a shared balcony, unfortunately you don't have one in the courtyard but you'll get fresh air through the window for sure, if you leave your room door open to the hallway. Look, you're at the end of the hall on the right, across from Joachim. Small, right? But you pay less. It isn't always so loud in the courtyard, the window's a good sound barrier, when it's closed. Are you a deep sleeper?

You've got to paint when you move in,32 only your room. You can be glad, that it's so small and the ceiling is low. We always used it as a storage room, I'll

31 This is becoming less and less common; however, this is still a characteristic of older, low-cost apartments. 32 It is very common to have to paint either when moving in or moving out. 33 admit, do you understand me? M-hmm. No, eh? Better that way.

The room is unfurnished. Oh, another thing, no one is registered here so you have to think of something for yourself. Got any friends in the city where you can register? No, eh? Oh God, I honestly don't know how we're going to live together. My English is really shitty and your German, yeah, I'm just going on and on. Sorry that Joachim isn't here today, otherwise he could help us. He's taking American Studies at the Humboldt University, no idea if he speaks English, but he reads it for sure. Do you like the room?... The apartment?... D'you like the whole idea?... You like?... Oh God, I wouldn't understand anything anyway.

Listen. End of the week. We'll call you. Lots of people want to move in here. We'll see, yeah? I'd offer you a coffee but the next guy's coming soon so I'll have to say ciao for now. Wait, the apartment door doesn't close right, there's a board on the floor here that holds it closed. Lift it up and there you go.

Good, we'll call you, yeah. Keep looking, I'm not sure it looks so good for you here. There must be something closer to the university, with other foreign students, right? Have you looked whether there's an ad board in your building on campus? Maybe you'll hear from us yet, not really sure. But lots of luck and, yeah, goodbye, seeya then, toodle-oo!

Everyone in Germany must register their current address with the local police. In order to register, you must have a signature from your landlord or from someone in your apartment who is already registered there. Sometimes, as is suggested to be the case here, people will rent out a room in their apartment which is not intended for rent by the landlord so that renter will have to register elsewhere to avoid attracting the landlord's attention. The police stations have records of how many people are permitted to rent at every apartment and will notify landlords of deviations. Also, quite often if they are still living in the same city, young people moving out of their parents' homes will not bother changing their registered addresses to avoid the visit to and wait at the registration office. 34

7. Reichenbergerstrasse 59 - meeting Claudia and Christoph

Shaky second language over the phone:

- Konnen Sie das buchstabieren, bitte? - Ja klar, R-E-I-C-H-E-N-B-E-R-G-E-R- S-T-R-A-S-S-E. - Danke. - Okay, bis gleich. - TschiiB? r • 34 -Ja, ciao. Isn't hard to find, through the park near by, Gorlitzer Park, I've been through on a walk, the crater is what I remember most already.

Aus lander = foreigner

Lars keeps his room like a library, like a gallery, you are not to touch the pears, or decanter half full, red wine displayed like poison, uninviting, so I began looking around for a new place.

WG - Wohngemeinschaft = shared apartment

Oh a Canadian, let's speak in English! It is okay, I like to practice my English for my job, you see, with the government. Yes, I study too, but there is not so much time. For both, I mean, I like my job, they give me a mobile phone, that's right? Mobile?

Mitbewohner = roommate (masculine)

I must learn German. He serves himself but calls it helping, he reached out to me by email, an English speaker! An English speaker! Didn't yet realize why all the excitement... Lars, I'm moving out, I'm sorry,

- Can you spell that please? - Yes, of course. R-E-I-C-H-E-N-B-E-R-G-E-R-/ S-T-R-A-S-S-E. - Thank you. - Ok, see you soon. - Bye? - Yes, ciao. / need furniture, you see, I need a furnished place. Feels bad to lie. But his bed, a mat rolled up in his closet every morning. Not social, no friends around, no German, his girlfriend sometimes, boring, his mat unrolled longer hours? For her? He likes it if I'm out when she comes.

Mitbewohnerin = roommate (feminine

My route dictated by map of Berlin unfolded, unknown streets all look the same, buildings attached one after the other, side by side so close, outside walls only front and back. A building's side defined by an extra layer of blocks, fire and sound retardant. And the facades are painted differently, landlords stake their claim with colour, no fences, stakes or cornerstones. The streets seem lined with flags hanging the size of buildings all look the same to me. My map directs me out the door and left along Wrangelstrasse to first left, Cuvrystrasse, ends at a park gate 250 metres. Map says cross park, 200 metres wide, cross Wiener- strasse and carry on one more block to Reichenbergerstrasse, right, four and a half blocks up on my left. fremd = strange, foreign

I walk through the park, I've seen enough colourful Berlin streets on route to 12 WG's this week, not interested, fed up with this place, determined but it seems more like survival now. I walk down centre of park, on grass and it is good. Still I 36 cannot pretend to be home, the park here is wild, ungroomed, like a man should he live in this strange, green place long enough. Berlin's parks are city blocks untamed by services though the trees have been replanted since war used up several cities of supplies and civilians cut down every tree for warmth in winter. Berlin a moonscape. This crater I find in mid-G6rlitzer Park, the ground gives way, opens into huge bowl, empty, but for patchy grass and dirt. What is this here for? Why do the trees not advance past its edge? I do. At bottom I'm most open to attack from the top and the air hums in my ears, this alien place sings me the buzz of city closing in. I never did, never will, know about that crater, where the coming year I BBQ, sunbathe, sport, meet, smoke and never wonder about this hole again when everything surrounding grows familiar like the new lawn my parents planted back home.

Fremdsprache = foreign language

You are at the top, seventy-some stairs up and when I reach the top, I want to pause so you won't see me panting, but the stairs are wooden and stairway echoes and you are standing above me as I round the final landing, I don't feel under attack and you have your eyebrow pierced, and your hair is black but first, I notice you are smiling - Hallo. Ich bin Claudia. Wir haben am Telefon gesprochen. Lass uns erstmal auf Deutsch. Ich mach 's ganz langsam. and I understand you. Other roommate is Christoph,

Hallo. I am Claudia. We / spoke on the phone. Let us / first speak in German. I will / go slowly. 37 both of you back from Sweden where you were in my shoes and that is it.

Willkommen = welcome

Phone rings in my pocket three days later on the train and I'm nervous to answer a number I don't know, won't understand a word anyway, but no one could have this number unless I gave it so... a woman in my ear speaks in German and I understand, know it's you, Claudia, you from the apartment I've so badly wanted. The white walls, the clean, light linoleum floor. My room facing back courtyard, window looking through cargo elevator shaft in dark corner not built for people but the landlord rides and passes by fourth-storey when I'm naked but I don't care. Apartment: a kitchen with table, and six doors off: front door, double deadbolt; two bedrooms, large windows catching light and street below; room with shower and sink, glass-doored; room with toilet, sink and washer, glass-doored; two milky glass doors across from the table where we eat and a fridge against the wall between them; my room in far corner, new hollow door, only one you can hear through but at least you can't see through, my ceiling low, room dark. Claudia, Christoph, your rooms might be bigger and better but you could sleep in 'em, and the wine's had at kitchen table together. Yes, I take it and we'll meet again Friday, one week, Na bis Freitag! Wirfreuen uns! Me too.

Well, until Friday! We're so pleased! 38

8. Claudia I

Cigarettes out your bedroom window four storeys up and out onto the street, frame just wide enough two of us sit facing on the sill, blow second-hand at open shutters, the general direction. You let me in your room, first-hand companion, in the apartment for the reason, you said, I looked like a friend coming up the stairs. You looked like home, Claudia, an X on the spot.

On the train when you called, south to Dresden and I had no pen, dictionary in my bag, train screaming on tracks, countryside cell phone reception and my nerves off the rails. All the apartments, this one, you in it, now I belong. I can register! Resident of the Federal Republic of Germany! Student of Humboldt-Universitat! Kreuzberg! Two German Mitbewohner, I'll stay!

Claudia, my first friend in Berlin, you as new as I, you'd moved around in the West, then Gottingen to Uppsala to Berlin, arrived two weeks before me, five weeks in this apartment before it became unsere Wohnung . And we went to see Herr Lehmann , I didn't understand at all, and you hugged me afterward, said you had a good time. Seit dem ersten Blick hab ich dich lieb, deine Augen diinkel, lacheln mich an.39

Madonna4 burned candles all night and the room smelled warm, liquid and waxy. Wirfreuen uns , you said to me, Christoph held up his glass, eyes on me. I didn't really know what you'd said so I raised my

our apartment 38 German film (2003), about a man who lives and bartends in Kreuzberg in the 1980s. 39 Since first sight, I have loved you, / your eyes dark, they smile at me. 40 a bar on Wienerstrasse, close to the apartment We are so pleased. 39 glass blindly. Where is Christoph? His work ethic, his white room? Where did he go with the shaved-hair girl, her full-body pajama, treble clef carved in her head?

The fridge between glass bathroom doors was Christoph's and you used it least: tomato paste and your meals of crackers and salsa, coffee cups of instant soup that you took to your room. Your hugs thinned out as winter faded, I thought because you could ride your bike again. And as we carried your belongings down to the truck in manageable cotton shopping bags, I imagined you staying, but never told you, our correspondence opaque, happiness expressed, not felt. 10. A rippling in the glass

Seen through milky glass of shower room door, Claudia's body, a mixed palette of browns and beige.

Towelling her skin, she pulls me from my chipped red bowl of dry cereal as I grow convinced she sees me but

wants me not to know. Her head a chocolate tangle rustled by hair dryer, body long and wavy, tanned

ripples in glass's texture down to reddish-brown triangle, epicentre, hotbed radiance to cover up when someone is

looking. My gaze down her legs to knees bending as she dries her feet, gathered pools run to her toes from wet

hair embrace of torso scrubbed immaculate. My eyes begin again to climb, now up to her breasts, twin

teacups set on her laundered tablecloth, they tickle my retinas as I think of how perfectly they'd fit into my palms.

Her brown and beige enticing, I sit across from her, kitchen table to shower, our correspondence transparent through glass. 41

11. Marilyn Manson Concert

Marilyn Manson in Berlin and no one to go, I walked about Alexanderplatz debating, Greg was going but I didn't know him yet, and I stood beneath the TV tower looking straight up, watching the needle wave, towers seem to bend at the waist, like the CN Tower when I was eight, how I worried it would fall.

Lonely Planet Travel Guide: The best view of Berlin is from the TV tower at Alexanderplatz as this is the only view of the city without the TV tower in it...

Through the train station, out the other side, is Saturn; I went in to check out CDs, Canadian bands not found in Canadian stores, Coco Rosie, Godspeed..., Peaches, sudden deciding factor: if Peaches was opening the show, I had to give Oh Canada! support. (She was so drunk, stumbling across stage, falling on her face, true patriot love..., cursing. Though she's in my stereo now, I didn't call that singing.) Back to train station and a Bratwurst4 from walking grill man standing in the Square, like Samson bracing under goliath weight of propane tanks strapped on his back, BBQ grill and heat buckled waist-level, tongs in hand. Sweat under orange sun/rain umbrella overhead on a pole carried also by this man, sausages one Euro (1.50 now), ketchup, sent43, warm buns on his grill-side ledge. Some of grill men sit in wheelchair versions but I don't think they're paralyzed, and conflicted, I buy from the standers, strapped in, picture one-man-bands imprisoned by their own drums and cymbals.

Forty-five Euros at the Alex Theaterkasse between Burger King, Fahrscheinautomaten45 and souvenirs. My hand turns the ticket over and over: a November night, 2003, at the Velodrom46

German grilled sausage German mustard concert and events ticket shops in many large train stations train ticket machine 42 with Manson atop 20 foot podium, shaking his gavel and free hand at hundreds of us in the dark.

To the Velodrom: On foot ca. 400m, Reichenberger to Gorlitzer Bhf. - 7 min.; wait 3 min.; U-Bahn 1 to Tram M10 - 4 min.; wait 5 min.; Tram M10 to Tram M6 - 11 min.; wait 3 min.; Tram M6 - S Landsberger Allee - 2 min.; on foot ca. 200m - 3 min, not even.

Make-up blackens like bruises on bananas, closer still the faces whiten, more metal, more public displays of apparent inner pain, but they only want to hear the music, Manson with arms 10 feet long pointing at us, three elbow joints so they can bend limp over his head, still reach the floor. Long arms are godlike, power wielded by an abandon of proper dimensions.

So much black, the crowd a swarm of flies at the door and T-shirts: KILL YOUR GOD! THE WORLD IS AN ASHTRAY! SMELLS LIKE CHILDREN! WE LOVE HATE, WE HATE LOVE! The pentagrams and crucifixes, the beautiful people, the beautiful people, all relative to the size of your steeple, I had on the right colours, but no messages, slip in past the Gruftis47, rock music in Berlin the same, stage show something else.

Three giants in front of me and a guy my size, tattoo-covered, shaved heads, and muscles like sharks and marble statues, I thought that was it. They'll turn, kill me for play, once they tire of pushing each other, yelling, barking, roaring like lion cubs, playful but killer. To my right a dude standing alone, shaved head but for three candy red, one inch spikes lined up from forehead back to crown, bobbing that head to a beat of his own, still dressed in black, otherwise unmoving.

arena in east Berlin where concerts are often held goths Manson: "BERRRRRLLLLIIIIIIIIIIIIIIUNNNNNNNN! and the giants in front attack, smallest most ferocious, grabs the tallest and bites into his neck. I expect blood but they remain inter­ locked and the lips of the smaller move around. Hands around waists, lips release, bluish purple spreads like the Industrial Revolution, or a map of the UK and Ireland, across the tall man's neck. Until they begin to kiss and their mouths meet open, tongues lashing, combat, dominant male. What did Manson sing as this happened? These men seemed contradictions in their Hell's Angels leather, their muscles and masculinity, I realised then I knew nothing but television and films opening in theatres everywhere.

Manson screamed at us, hated us. He stripped his female dancers naked, they never missed a beat; sucked his microphone, the dancers on him behind white screen, their silhouettes! He covered them in champagne, seemed to ease the bottle inside one dancer on all fours from behind; held bottle up, audience scream, dancer writhing, dancing snakes; "I see all you faggots, BERLINNNN!" and the giants roar smiles, fists on own chests, punches into others; the chanting, FUCK YOU!; lights out between numbers; and a mannequin woman rolling robotic, trays of water and that champagne onto stage, Manson punches her face, snaps her head around, she comes for more, head hanging, inhuman, but dainty as Barbie and such a body; he tears the head from her and kisses the lips long and hard, curvaceous body strives on; head is thrown back on tray, bottles take flight, screaming cheer takes flight, and the music louder and louder.

Three months later Carla sees Pink in Berlin; says singer tears clothes off her dancers, gives them kisses long and hard, I wonder if it's a Berlin thing or perhaps it's no good being a dancer. But the uncensored Berlin stage brings in all the big names, go alone, and you'll see 'em do it all. 14. Esther

Not vanilla or vanilla musk, neither perfume nor spice; I wish I had a catalogue of scents, I'd look her up, find that the honey in her hair was sweet as a bee's nest, spicy as cloves in winter wine that hasn't cooled to a tongue's liking but fills the room with awareness, a dance she did and told me I could too, a dance I tried too near and she had me, the sticky nectar of her skin.

Initial taste perfect, though every breath between caresses vowed retraction, she left no token save for olfactory cues as sugar on my pillows, the places she sat, we laid, she laughed, candy on her tongue soured, and she became the first to show me hate in this city, the overcast Berlin sky, the quiet, numbing panic of ashen sheets pulled tighter over­ head, between us and every colour, taut enough to smooth to disappear all trace of the unknown and I am inured, I assumed the worst from her.

I'll hate you in the morning, not a whisper but rumour in my ear, undeniable as the slow onslaught of scented oils in the air from ornate dishes over candles, but hate is too strong, I shook awake to see her over me, mouthing that 'sjust how it is and I asked why, asked her not to, and why she would tell me this as we lay there? 45

/ will hate you moved her teeth and lips.

But it was Berlin that hated me in the morning, daylight never broke and cars honked at us and shone headlights reflecting in street puddles as if the streetlights stayed on all day and it rained all day; this is all true. That she and I walked up the Oranienstrasse and the cafes of Heinrich Platz hadn't put chairs out, le Bateau Ivre noyais son chagrin dans l'alcool, der Elefant war heute drinnen geblieben und niemand spielte die rote Harfe.4f We walked on, never intending to stop, through streets that became unfamiliar after the dental and law offices of Oranienplatz.

Our lefts and rights without speaking, her language was beautiful when others spoke it but she said everything like an argument, jno soy espanol, soy catalana!49, she carried it with her everywhere, silence became pleasant when she said my Spanish was as bad as my dancing and she didn't want to hear my Canadian French. No idea where we were walking, into an area I've never placed as Kreuzberg or Mitte50, somewhere between, perhaps 300m south of the Spree51 and maybe if we had

the / Drunken Boat drowned its / sorrows, the Elephant stayed / inside today and / no one was playing the Red Harp. (Bateau Ivre [Drunken Boat], Zum Elefanten [At The Elephant's], and Rote Harfe [Red Harp] are all bars on Heinrich Platz in Kreuzberg, Berlin.) 49 I'm not Spanish, I'm Catalonian! 50 areas of Berlin bordering on each other seen the river, she'd have been cleansed in water.

She wore long blouses and beads over tight black tees and maroon-coloured sports bras. Her skin was maple and her auburn hair blended over it keeping her clothed when she wasn't. Dark red nipples and so much black pubic hair, my ears tingled and skin prickled under and lifted the hairs on my neck like tiny sensors receiving her small touches. Her skin tasted sharp as cacti and sweet as the jelly and she wore constant goosebumps on her bum cheeks, the only truly naked part of her. She told me she hated to make love without being in love, we were in the middle of it and I asked her if she thought it a time to discuss. Nothing was ever finished between us, nothing had a chance to begin, because the train screeched to a halt at U Heinrich-Heine Platz52 eight times before she got on that day by the river just out of sight, and we had thrown every circular love- hate crown down onto the tracks under steel wheels.

The city is not a bad place but it holds the same no matter where you land. Berlin was new until I met her six months in and the old feelings returned,

1 river running east-west through Berlin' 2 Heinrich-Heine Square subway station 47 the high school helplessness, the solitude of a long walk home after a loved one boards a train or worse a plane. I woke up to winter in Berlin when it always rains and covers the city in flus, tissues and frowns. My lips were chapped when I got home from the way she used her teeth when she kissed me goodbye eight times. 48

17. Meeting Antje

"Help us lift this couch rather than sitting on it."

Four stories down to open rear of truck - Robben & Vintges affordable, bring it back with a full tank.

"Help us lift it; don't slump," hungover underneath, loose as fabric falling away from cushion springs. "Big night last night?" "Yeah it was." "Ok, fine, but lift," Claudia's boyfriend Hagen speaks in German, my two visiting friends sweat alcohol, don't comprehend Hagen's scolding.

Three Canadians, two Germans and an apartment's worth crammed into one of three bedrooms - one roommate out, one in, two stay the same, nothing stays the same.

Truck full, room empty, and my preferred roommate, with the thin hips, hair sometimes black, and a smoke rolling between her fingers, is gone. My voice resonating from the future - this time of recollection for writing and I have made so many mistakes - CLAUDIA PLEASE FIND ME I AM ALMOST 30

We're twenty-three, her furniture carried down, a jumble now shaped like a truck. Claudia leaves...

Dresden girlfriend walks in then, her car an airport shuttle for my two departing Canadian friends.

"It's time then." "Coffee first?" "On the way." "OK."

My hand outstretched to exit apartment and latch creaks first on its own, door opens not on its own but in harmony with blonde hair and a smile walking in. My girlfriend's frown reshapes her face into a yield sign, my two friends greet the new girl with long, Canadian

affordable Berlin moving supply company 49

Helloooooooo.

"Hallo!" she says, "Ich bin Antje, ick zieh hier ein. "Oh, uhh." "Ach spricht ihr Englisch? Na gut, I'm Antje and 1 am the new flatmate. For Claudia, she is gone?"54

"Hello!" she says, "I'm Antje, I'm movin' in here." / "Oh, uhh." / "Ah, you speak English? Alright good, I'm Antje and /1 am the new flatmate. For Claudia, she is gone?" 18. Antje I

deine Augen sehen, was meine Augen sehen

Stepping around, lifting your knees high shaking one fist at your side with invisible drumstick beating out the rhythm, twisting slowly on each foot in turn, head leaned slightly to one side, laughing, lyrics formed mute on your lips, eyes on me, in your room, these were your moves, your dancing I have mimicked at parties since and felt removed.

Claudia out, you in, and we stole fast kisses when Christoph turned his back, silencing the lip smack, touching moistened mouths together, lips still and supple and then apart. He would ask why we were laughing as he turned - you nearly slipped, I crossed my eyes, your zipper down, my shirt inside out, an earlier joke, an inside joke, any excuse, and Christoph bought them all. But we weren't joking, Antje, describe my face when our open mouths parted behind closed doors and we were alone, because yours was the widest I have ever seen, expression of surprise perhaps, longing pulling your chin down, eyes wide, cheeks red like a pinch or I hadn't shaven. We kissed for a long time.

Helloooooooo, my friends said when you first came in and they wolf whistled the 25 minutes to the airport. Not my type, I probably insisted, in my girlfriend's car on route, her face stuck upside down and I yielded, stopped with caution. Buddies though, dudes, pull me aside at the gate, say she appeals more to the carnal senses, and slap my back, a poster backdrop, photo of a woman topless in a hammock advertises cheap Air Berlin flights south as girlfriend comes back from the washroom, agrees to take our photo in front of these public breasts, three big Canadian smiles, them goosing me.

your eyes see what my eyes see Partly your breasts that scared me, Antje, I've said before a girl who knows what to do with her own lets me tend to every other square inch and succeed, guys tell me they personally are not drawn to boyish figures when I point out women in the mall or on the beach. Yours, Antje, were full, firm, large enough I was hopelessly happy for bras and tees at first. Partly your happiness that scared me, never wanting to see you cover those crooked teeth with a straight face, full lips thinning, whitening, blue eyes fading to grey, looking away, wet.

Partly you as roommate, the term, North American, fast making more sense than British flatmate. We shared more on your couch every night watching movies, your laptop a library of tunes we danced to, films we saw from the couch under blankets but never touching, then legs touching, then upper arms and elbows, knees, and eventually forearms crossed, your left over my right, hands on new legs, heads with new shoulders to rest on. But the furniture was not yours. Claudia into Hagen's apartment, everything included, and you in her room as she left it, us smoking cigarettes on Claudia's couch nowhere near the window, careless.

I stopped shaving my head after American History X, you told me I looked like Edward Norton with goatee to match, I asked if it was the biceps, but shelved my clippers for good. I laugh at this now without the guilt that took me away. Those minutes apart from you, in my bedroom across the kitchen on the phone, I'll be right back, but she'd keep me on the phone for every waking detail and I told her of university, meine Auslander56, party updates, but the apart­ ment I always said was the same - kissing roommates held as distant as Canada, real

my foreigners but not there. I remember her laughing that I didn't know Jean Chretien was gone, Paul Martin a vague CBC News name, and I was angry at her prodding until back with you and the skin of my forehead smoothed over the folds underneath.

You and I danced on the Hoppetosse till sun-up, that cruiseboat docked forever on the Spree, river slap endlessly portside, starboard bumping roughly on cement wall, we could only remain tied on a moving, powerful body so long. Boat turned club, some still travel the Spree east-west, drunken passengers whooping and leaning over the bow, but a dead boat's cheaper to party on and we could rest assured we'd get off where we got on, but we didn't.

Your jar of Nutella in bed next morning reminded my girlfriend didn't like Nutella and I realised I had not done what I told her I would do - nothing.

Was I scared? No, I had no allergies but she might have found you sticky on my tongue stuck in silent moments on the phone so perhaps I should've been alarmed.

I pushed that aside, and said thank you to your navel for holding the butter knife. 53

18a. / woke up in Berlin

Eigenartig wie Du mich ganz gewohnlich mit einem Kuss griisst. Weifit Du: die Punks wachen auf dem Alexanderplatz auf, mit einer dutzenden Fernsehturme auf dem Kopf Die Schwulen offnen meistens in Schoneberg die Augen und die Studenten in Prenzlauer Berg. Die Skins sind anderswo, hier nicht hoffen wir. Jeder durft zur Parade hin- und herziehen. Mauern wurden auf- und abgebaut. So ist es.

Folgende Formulare sind unbedingt auszufullen, ansonsten bleiben Sie bitte dort, wo Sie herkommen.

Die Anmeldestelle uberfullt sich mit den iiblichen Einwohnern, die es unbequem finden, immer in derselben Wohnung zu sitzen. Die Alteren halten an den sauberen, friedlichen Vierteln fest. Lieber versteht man die Jugendlichen und ihren neuen Stolz nicht.

Die Reichen kommen aus den Vororten her, wahrend die Kiinstler fuhlen sich bei den Hunden zuhause, dort, wo die Strassen aus Kopfsteinpflaster entstehen.

In einer langen Schlange warten die Auslander schon stundenlang. Sie wurden sich freuen, noch langer bleiben zu diirfen.

Eines Tages bin ich einfach hereingeflogen und langer geblieben. In Deinem Bett, wo die Kissen nach Dir allein riechen. Mein Zimmer nebenan, ein fremdes Land. Hieraus komme ich nicht. Ich bin angemeldet. Nehme ich hier den Platz eines Anderen ein? Einer, der sich hier besser auskennt?

Du bist Berliner, sagst Du mir, also Ruhe. 54

18a. / woke up in Berlin [English translation]

Odd the way you greet me with a familiar kiss. You know,

the punks wake up on Alexander Square a dozen TV towers on their heads. Schoneberg is where the queers open their eyes, and the students do the same in Prenzlauer Berg, skinheads elsewhere, we hope anywhere but here. But everyone may parade through the streets; walls built up, walls torn down. So it goes.

The following forms are to be filled out, without exception, otherwise, please stay wherever you come from.

The registration office overflows, the usual citizens, who find it uncomfortable always calling the same home sweet home. The elderly stand strong in other districts clean and peaceful. Best not to understand today's youth, their new pride.

Business travels in from the outskirts, penetrates inward where the artists feel at home with the dogs, where cobblestones cooperate as streets.

In a line hours long, immigrants have stood, standing in hope they might stay/stand longer.

I flew in one day and remained longer. In your bed where the pillows smell like you alone. My room next door, a foreign land. I won't get out of this. I have registered. Have I taken the place of another who knows his way around?

You are a Berliner, you tell me, quiet now. 24. Krossenerstrasse 7, Friedrichshain — moving

The apartment opens onto long hallway like S-bahn tracks running through Berlin. To the left a kitchen built of wood planks and metal L- and T-brackets for shelves, cupboards and counter. The washer rocking the sink, spin cycle shattering glasses in the metal basin waiting to be washed by hand. Kitchen table, grooved and notched, knot­ holes collecting the crumbs of months of toast, butter going rancid under overhead lamp, attached to ceiling pealing layers, curled, yellowed white and primer rubbed thin leaving plaster to rain where it may. The floorboards tired and split as the table, collecting hair and soil, lint and dust, not a vacuum to be found, rather a frayed broom with split ends, chairs creaked, seats woven of twine or hay. Dishes and food stacked together and Stef never used soap to get the plates clean, only hot water. Dark blue washed walls, inconsistent colour as if we were suspended in murky aquarium in far corner. A broken jukebox, a pottery bowl on top, old bananas, a few apples plus one tooth-marked core inside. Walls nearly black in spots, sky blue in others, aquamarine, cobalt, azure, indigo, navy, accidental, a burst pen. Three-quarter fridge, a gas oven across, no pilot, white tiles tanned by specks of grease dripping up from stove. Lastly, in the far corner, behind the murky fishes, a pantry, three feet high, serves as office space, tiny table, tiny chair, cassettes, discs, headphones, monitor, in the square footage of a Volkswagen Jetta.

Away from kitchen gasses, from compost bin under sink, but always eyeing the ancient oven. Next right, the bathroom, same smeared walls but red; red as artificial gore, as maraschino cherries, their goo and sugar; red as fire engine paint applied in the garage while buildings burn and burn away; red as wrath itself that pulls at the plaster in this place and keeps it oh 56 so quiet. Red as blood, blood in a bathroom, and never a doctor's appointment the year and a half I stayed across the hall in that room. The bathroom floor sticky under bare feet and blackened, three-dimensional under raised, chipped red tub. Sink used to be white, mirror wasn't broken, tiles from wall to wall, a time long before mine. The toilet seat graffiti we sat on, big-toothed, bug-eyed cartoon art on wood; no water tank but the jug jammed between the pipe and wall behind flusher, when filled, provides down force if properly timed, and ice is always broken by full explanation with demonstration of flush routine to every visitor. This effort on the fourth floor above Friedrichshain and the dogs dropping shit everywhere below.

Beside the bathroom, boy's room, tiny; marker and pen scribbles over pinstriped loveseat, bare wood cabinet, chipped plaster walls, the trimming, the window sill. Artwork on the walls like chalk drawings in a play school, like the toilet seat, but here framed and hung level. I laugh the bed cover's same as mine. His name is Felix, plays instruments, skateboards and paints, his mother runs home from parties to check on him at night. Her name, Janette, the father, Stef, and I move in on time for the final, silent, wintry six months before Stef does the opposite.

End of hall, huge cherry wardrobe, make-shift bed on shelf above where Felix hides, just outside his parents' room on the left. Think again of a library, but unlike Lars on Wrangelstr., everything here is touched and worn, shelves upon shelves and books Janette reads before sleep, no matter what party still courses through her veins. The plants are many, stretched long and golden across novels, coffee table volumes, a stereo, large speakers, vinyl, 23 empty wine bottles with half- burned candles dripping down, across a double, unmade bed, pillows pushed up the wall, and wide framed edge of plates, empty glasses and crumbs, across lamps like glowing, orange globes full of the 1970s, across piles of clothes 57 and a drying rack hung with black panties and T-shirts. Room speaks: "strip naked and twist in the incense, cover up, out and never open the door again."

My room-to-be across hall from the bath, walls escaped their companions' smudged fate. The only bare white walls, they curve twelve feet up smoothly into vaulted ceiling. Whitish lamp shade hung from whitish cord in the centre and I would lay on my futon for hours looking up into the bulb, the whiteness of the flared shade, that of the ceiling and walls coming together without lines, borders, edges or otherwise, just an eye-searing glow that could tear you up with reassurance that everything fits together if lit up bright enough and Berlin's shady grey is only bad in winter. The room has been emptied, the yellow plants cut back and Stef boarded up the open, double- door passage to their struggling greenhouse and used book store, drywalled both sides, insulated between, doorframe left still marking the spot. The floor of the room, splintering boards, very standard, and better than the fake stuff. Bonus is the balcony off my room alone, not shared and I wonder why my roommates give this up, they've been here for years, but I don't yet know my two-fifty is half the month's rent. Balcony over street far below, over a bench outside a community centre of sorts for people who rock back and forth, humming, counting their fingers, smoking without words, communicating everything instantly about themselves, but never telling how the hell they'd become. I took photos of them. From where I stood, high up, only sky and corrugated terracotta roof of building across, Berlin as clean and small and unknown as I wanted it to be. My Auslander year gone, but still riding the bonus of "inevitable misunderstandings" rolling off my back like water and ducks, never stuck with that sticky word, "error." 58

25. Friedrichshain

Returning from Lidl57, discount food in stretching plastic bags, one in each hand, my hands and Hagen and Claudia's walking ahead, the sun pushing through the trees in full September green.

Difficult return to Berlin after first visit home, nowhere to live, Antje let the Reichenberger apartment go, good reasons, I'm single now after bad mole hills became mountains, teaching English at high school I do not like, teachers in permanent positions, average age of staffroom 62, two excluding myself under 45, including myself, they wondered what I was doing in their room.

Turn for better when my stretching plastic, about to split, caught on handhold of this September afternoon and I realised I was happy, not suddenly or flickering like phosphorescent glow overhead from leafy veins. I was happy. A bag of food in each hand, and bottles of O-Saft58 and Rabenhorst Bio Kirsch Nektar59 from Getrankeladen60 next to Lidl where Boxhagener Strasse runs nearest Ostkreuz , O-Saft und Vodka Kirsch , bookends of vitamin- enriched day. Sustenance weighty in us, just the three of us, six bags and the weekend, they let me live for free that month so

I bought food and felt much more a contributor walking northwest up Boxhagener to Krossenerstr. corner where Hagen and Claudia (and I) called number 36 home, above the Plotten-Kopieren-Scannen-

Drucken Laden63, this happiness in original press, penned by author's hand, indentation and ink fresh on new paper. And though that paper yellowed, ink faded and smudged by time perspiring along Krossener

Street broken and split; by roommate affairs at number 7 soon after called home for 18 months; by partying, no money, renovations and red paint, hole knocked through a wall in one day, four to patch it up, stone and mortar, block remaining roommates out, or in, depending on which side you stand; by arguments over my rent being half

discount super market chain German abbrev. for orange juice Rabenhorst is a brand name; "bio" signifies "organic" in German; Krisch Nektar - cherry nectar "drink store" selling all types of beverages, incl. alcoholic and non-alcoholic, but excluding dairy East Cross train station orange juice and vodka cherry - Vodka and cherry nectar is a popular drink at Berlin nightclubs. Plotting-Copying-Scanning-Printing Shop 59 the total when I accounted for a quarter, arguments over halves and quarters slipping out of our hands and change purses, my grandfather warned never to talk politics, money or sports with friends; by friends becoming roommates, then only roommates, then nothing but names- Greg the Confused, Janette the Dishonest, Felix the Forgotten, Stef the Broken, Celine the Distant, and David who stood by me and outlived the rest, the day I packed, feet back on the ground; by a last ditch move deep into West Berlin where I never felt comfortable, the marble floors of shopping centres, the neon signs, the crowds of Ku'damm64, tourists storming the Gedachtniskirche65, junkies sucking Sternburg and Schultheiss66 outside Zoologischer Garten67; by new lodgings for a month before Easter 2006 in Joachim- Friedrichstr. near S Halensee68, stone's throw from Westkreuz69, diametrical pole from Ostkreuz snapping Berlin in half, before I returned to Kreuzberg, regression, sizzling 36 to 6170 where my three years fizzled toward flight from this place, out of contact.

But that was not it! I'm sped back to my heavy groceries under luminous, thin-lipped smiles of tree-filtered sun and my two best walking ahead, as I read these words:

June 11, 2008: Arrived in Berlin this evening at 22:45, no problems with the flights but 10 hr. layover in London Gatwick... Claudia, Hagen, Caro, Greg & Celine met me at Flughafen Schonefeld71! It was amazing. They all look good and much how I remember them, how I think they've always looked. Claudia's hair is a lighter brown & looks very good. They are beautiful people. We came back to H & C's (where I'm staying for now) and drank Sekt7 and rolled cigarettes like back then. I feel at home here. I've missed it here so much. H & C told me they're happy I'm here and they missed my saying "alright," "cool," "right on," "oh yeah," and such. That's awesome.

64 German abbrev. for Kurfurstendamm, a major shopping street in West Berlin 65 The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church - one of Berlin's landmarks. The damaged tower is a symbol of Berlin's resolve to rebuild the city after the war and a constant reminder of the destruction of war. 66 two cheap brands of German beer 67 Zoological Garden - main train station of West Berlin 68 Halensee city train station 69 West Cross train station 70 SO 36 and SO 61 are the two former postal code districts of Kreuzberg (see section 48. Kreuzberg) 71 Berlin-Schonefeld Airport 72 German for champagne produced outside of Champagne, the northeastern region of France. 60

Claudia and I discussed the words "overwhelming" and "awe-inspiring" vs. "uberwaltigend"73 and "umwerfend."74 The EuroCup has begun! Going to watch the Germany game with Hagen tomorrow at an outside bar called Lovelite75.

AW: Hey Claudia!!! Sent: March 5, 2009 12:37:42 PM Hej! Da bin ich wieder. Es ist so schon von dir zu horen! Wie geht es dir denn, mit deinem langen Gedicht (Wow! Darf ich es lesen, wenn es fertig ist?) und iiberhaupt? Bald bist Du fertig mit der Uni und dann in Berlin. Darauf freue ich mich schon jetzt. Bleibst Du dann fur immer, bitte? Natiirlich kannst Du bei mir wohnen. Ich habe genug Platz und Du kannst wieder mein Mitbewohner werden. Wie toll ware das denn?! Aber ich sollte dir erst einmal von der Wohnung, dem Auszug etc. erzahlen. [...] Die Wohnung kostet 340€ Warmmiete, das ist nicht viel fur ca. 65m2. Da ich einiges renovieren werde, muss ich weniger Miete zahlen. Natiirlich ist die Wohnung plus Strom und Gas zu teuer fur mich alleine, aber ich habe schon Losungen dafur. Ein Zimmer vermiete ich - wenn alles klappt - an eine Frau, die ihre Mobel unterstellen will. Auflerdem werde ich Hunde-Nanny fur Yvonnes Hund, die allein zu wenig Zeit hat. Eigentlich wohnt sie mit ihrer Frau Sam zusammen, aber Sam arbeitet in Kiew fur drei Jahre. So bekomme ich noch ein bisschen Geld dazu. Auflerdem bleibt ein Zimmer in Wohnung dann reserviert, so dass Du einziehen kannst, wenn Du nach Berlin ziehst. Na? Das kannst Du nicht ablehnen! Hagen sucht sich nun mit Daniel zusammen eine Fabriketage o.a. Sie wollen nicht in einer „normalen" Wohnung zusammen wohnen. Ich schatze mal, dass Hagen noch 3-4 Monate in der Krossener wohnen wird. Er hilft mir beim Renovieren, dariiber freue ich mich sehr. Im Moment fallt es mir oft schwer herauszufinden, wie es ihm geht. Er redet ja nicht viel dariiber. Ich hoffe wirklich, dass wir uns bald besser verstehen werden und wieder zueinanderfinden. Wir haben uns nur noch gestritten, missverstanden, gegenseitig verletzt. [...] So, nun muss ich mich leider wieder verabschieden. Hagen und ich sind in der Wohnung verabredet. Wollen mal unter den graBlichen Teppich und das DDR-Laminat gucken. Vielleicht gucken bildschone Dielen zuriick? Fuhl dich umarmt und herzliche GruBe! Yours Claudia

73 compelling, overwhelming, resounding, stunning, vast, mind-blowing 74 arresting, dazzling, staggering, stunning, mind-boggling 75 see section 60. Lovelite courtyard, EuroCup '08 76 Re: Hey Claudia!!! Sent: March 5, 2009 12:37:42 PM Hey! Here I am again. It is so nice to hear from you! 61

26. Krossenerstr. 7 to Oranienburgerstr.

Twelve minutes on foot from Krossenerstrasse77 7 - 82 stairs down, handrail pushes chipping brown paint into my palm and windows are cracked and spiders spin webs inside and out, catch dust that steals the afternoon sun from the stairwell and I feel like a squatter in a building forgotten by all Sanierungsinitativen - to U+S Warschauer Strasse.

Everything rain-slick on the street, the cobblestones shimmer like the crowns of bald men's heads, like those of newborns - Kopfsteinpflaster . Water awaits in the grooves between them, moats with four ninety degree turns around perfectly square castles. Underfoot, East Berlin remains well-fortified. Oblivious, new-millennium car tires slap over the watery defences with rolling staccato beat of horse herds racing, the castles of my street remain, unblemished.

Take the sidewalk - protected from narrow street traffic by

How's it going then, with your long poem (Wow! Can I read it when it's finished?) and everything? Soon you'll be finished at university and then in Berlin. I'm already looking forward to it. Will you stay then forever, please? Of course you can stay with me. I have enough room and you can be my roommate again. How great would that be then?! But first I should tell you about the apartment, moving out, etc. [...] The apartment costs 340€ warm rent, which isn't much for approx. 65m2. Because I have to renovate some, I get cheaper rent. Of course, the apartment plus power and gas is too expensive for me alone, but I've already come up with some solutions. One room I'll rent - if all works out - to a lady who needs a place to store her furniture. Then I'll be a dog nanny for Yvonne who has too little time on her own. She actually lives with her wife Sam, but Sam is working in Kiev for three years. So I'll make a little money that way. On top of all this, there's one room reserved in the apartment for you to move into when you move back to Berlin. Yeah? You can't turn that down! Hagen's looking for an industrial loft with Daniel. They don't want to live together in a "normal" apartment. I'm guessing Hagen will live in the Krossener apartment for another 3-4 months. He's helping me with the renovations and I'm so glad. At the moment, it is difficult for me to find out how he's doing. He's doesn't talk much about it. I really hope that we'll soon get along better and find our way back to one another. Lately we've only fought, misunderstood and hurt each other. [...] So, sadly I have to sign off again. Hagen and I are meeting at the apartment. We want to look under the dreadful carpets and GDR lino. Maybe picture perfect hardwood will peer back at us? Feel hugged and heartfelt greetings! Yours, Claudia

77 -strasse or -strafie - Street 78 Restoration Initiatives 79 U - subway station, S - city train station, U+S - both 80 cobblestones, lit. "head-stone-plaster" 62

lines of parked cars, they rarely move, trams and busses packed, the drum roll clops turned a roaring thunder under a bus passing every 20 minutes or Wuhlischstrasse Tram 23 screaming a banshee's warning to anyone crossing the rails out of turn -1 jump at the sound bearing down and hop on the 23 screeched to a halt.

Berlin is a walking city, never a hill to contend with, wide sidewalks. The enemy is time in the vast expanse of the capital in all directions so I walk hours on end if I have nowhere to go. The pavement and cobblestones under overhanging trees - Berlin is all grey and green. Street-side, windowed facades reflect my forward gait - do I really walk like that? The blue of the sky runs above, a pale blue river as narrow as the street framed in by buildings, the river opens at street corner intersections where I look up and drink in the natural light of four tributaries spilling into the centre, a lake of sky shaped like a cross. Can you see it as well as I? My eyes and skin crave open space above, the vitamin D penetration of sun. How this city street is the mirror image of crystalline rivers under overcast skies, how this city turns it upside down.

No time, I take the tram past the jewelry shops, cafes, and recycled clothing, past Gabriel-Max Strasse where Hagen's old gallery Silberblau81 once shone, past a bar full of robots risen from trash heaps and blow-torches, past four Donerladen and chins dripping purple cabbage and KrautersoPe.83

Past Simon-Dach Strasse lined with tables, umbrellas, cheap pizza, drinks outside and servers taking their time because customers will keep coming.

Past Kaiser's - the king of corner supermarkets, everything one needs at a royal price, but bottles are cheap - Sternburg84, 0.5L, 0.5Euros and my stomach never the same.

Past a green space with groups of leather-clad punks

1 lit. "Silverblue" 2 Kebab shop 3 Herb yoghurt used as a sauce 4 a very cheap German beer 63 laying in the grass, Rotties lounging quiet and unleashed between them, and the area backed by a wall plastered in telephone long-distance ads, concert listings, and TV faces rolled on with a paint roller dripping white glue.

Then Friedrichshain86 is past and we roll over the Warschauerbriicke above S-bahn lines cutting a wide, flat valley through the centre of the city.

I step off the 23 under a sheet of sky so massive it is neither water nor blue, it is a dilute, mute, pallid cloth, pinned up at the corners on the horizon, drooping above me (like the headliner in grandma's old car) but never low enough to touch. Not far to the west along the train lines, on the Fernsehturm tries to pierce a hole in the fabric, but is lost in the mist of previous sky recently fallen. Cars rush over this bridge between Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg90, between former East and West, over the East Side Gallery still standing for a time of Iron and Zones when the crossing was impossible. Crossing at top speed as if memory still chases the drivers, the gunfire and sirens when East to West meant escape-with-your-life. Now I stand in relaxation and forgive myself for forgetting my camera, I have so many photos of Ostbahnhof91 from here, 1 km away, the TV tower appearing just behind it, and 500 m to the east, another bridge, the rusted red and brown Modersohnbrucke92 which I mistake for Ostkreuz , 500m again beyond.

This train valley, sometimes 100m wide, sometimes maybe 10, cuts the city from east to west end, under bridges and stations in imitation of the Spree 4 river braiding itself to and fro under

85 Rottweilers 86 eastern district of Berlin, former East Berlin district 87 -briicke - bridge; Warsaw Bridge 88 Berlin city train 89 TV Tower 90 district in geographically eastern Berlin, but formerly a district of West Berlin 91 lit. East Train Station, former main train station of East Berlin 92 a bridge to the east of the Warsaw Bridge 93 lit. East Crossing, a main public transportation hub in the east of Berlin 64

the tracks.

Down the stairs and I'm under the bridge. Pigeons make deep-throated warble and gulp sounds overhead and drop white globs onto the platform, the Imbiss95 and Kiosk96 roofs, unlucky passengers, announcement megaphones, benches, station maps, train schedules, newspapers, train tracks, sleepy dogs, bicycle seats and handlebars, stairs, garbage bins, info booths, ticket windows and each other. The pigeons are happy, but the cleaners, well... they work tirelessly, the station does not turn white.

Every S-bahn headed east/west on these lines makes the same stops between Ostkreuz and Westkreuz97: S5, S7, S75, S3, S9 stopping east to west at Ostkreuz - Warschauer Str. - Ostbahnhof- Jannowitzbrucke - Alexanderplatz - Hackescher Markt - Friedrichstrasse - Hauptbahnhof-Lehrter Bahnhof - Bellevue - Tiergarten - Zoologischer Garten - Savignyplatz - Charlottenburg - Westkreuz and the same in reverse order eastward. This is the spinal column of Berlin passing passengers like nervous messengers back and forth, transferring at switching stations to appendages protruding in all directions along the two-dimensional spread of the S + U Bahn-Netz98. The quickest way to travel, trains every 3-7 minutes during the rush, every 20-40 in the wee hours of the weekend when I stumble dizzy up and down the platform and every flat surface invites me to lay down.

S75 buzzes as it slows to a stop, doors slide open, the regular announcement begins: Einsteigen bitte...zuruckbleiben bitte... the lights above the doors flash red, the alarm sounds, not loud, not quiet, just one low tone, then higher, then the low tone once more and the doors glide closed with me inside the car second to the front, with a purpose.

the river flowing east-west through Berlin snack/fast food kiosk convenience kiosk lit. West Crossing, a main public transportation hub in the west of Berlin city train and subway network boarding, please.. .stand back, please 65

An S-bahn moves on a cushion of air. Not really but relative to the scraping grind of the trams, hauling themselves onward, steel on steel, and shuddering past pedestrians and traffic lights, the S-bahn hovers and floats, whooshes through black tunnels, buzzes as I said, even in narrow underground stations, the wind the S-bahn pushes is louder in your ears than the tons of metal and fibreglass following, inside tons of people, dogs and bikes. S75 sways back and forth, rocking me to sleep so I stare hard out the window and listen to passengers talk on their cell phones:

Ja Stifle, ich bin gleich da...Na keine Ahnung, ich hab Hdnchen und Gemtise im Kuhlschrank.

Heute war echt ein Scheifltag.

Haste den Film schon gesehen, ja. Schade, ich wtirde den gern sehen.

Oh Gott, mein Akku ist schon wieder alle.

Der Flug war ok...Schonefeld ist aber echt weit weg, oder! 4

Nee, ich hab Hdnchen gesagt.105

Doch! Du war's. Sowas wtirde ich nie sagen. Wie kannst Du's mir antun?106

107 Ja, Du auch. Ich hab Dich so Lieb. Sagen Sie, wo steige ich denn aus?...Ja, und dann noch ein Bus, oder? 108

It strikes me as amazing how well they all speak German, with such ease. Always this thought in my head and I laugh at myself, think of how I speak English in racing short sentences when not

100 Yes, sweetie. I'll be right there.. .Well, I don't know. I have chicken and vegetables in the fridge. 101 Today was truly a shitty day. 102 You've already seen the movie, eh. That's a shame, I'd really like to see it. 103 Oh God, my battery is almost dead again. 104 The flight was okay.. .but Schonefeld [an airport in south Berlin, mainly European flights] is really far away, isn't it. 105 No, I said chicken. 106 It was too you! I'd never say something like that. How can you do this to me? 107 Yes, you too. I love you so much. 108 Tell me [formal language], where do I get off?...Yes, and then another bus, right? wanting anyone to understand. So many speak English here, speak languages of everywhere, I never feel as free to speak my English mind out loud as I might German in Canada. And my Auslander group speaks slow, stunted German so no one has native privilege, unanimous giggle on even ground when one of us identifies error.

Under the arching roof of Ostbahnhof, people board and deboard, bored and still bored, but not I for I see it all happening, I opt not for a newspaper, a book, a crying baby, a cell phone, dark shades, a nap, a traveling companion, a laptop, a bottle or swimming eyes behind puffy red shutters, I prop my thin lids open and cast my gaze across the platforms, arrivals and departures of S-bahns, red regional trains slow as locomotives, the smooth, long, white airplane noses of the ICE's - Inter City Express.

Jannowitzbriicke is indoors as well, though the entrance and exit for trains are large, open passages at either end of the station letting in the air, the season, wind, temperature, this is standard among above-ground train stations but it always shocks me to come up from the cafes, corridors, and escalators below to the covered tracks and be outside without sunlight or sky. Jannowitzbriicke is built of red and orange brick, one centre platform and the tracks on either side. Outside the closed in S-bahn tracks, the regionals and ICE blast by at high speed.

Alexanderplatz like Ostbahnhof. Platforms, trains, announcements, passengers, inside (sort of). But out the window is Alex itself, the meeting place of East Berlin for Berliners East and West: der Fernsehturm die Weltuhr der Brunnen der Volkerfreundschaft109. Today reunited: electronics megastore Saturn, six-storey department store Kaufhof Burger King, Subway, you name it, and the Platz110 gets smaller and smaller, no longer Alexanderplatz"1, only Alex.

the TV Tower / the World Clock / the Fountain of Friendship Between Peoples - places 110 Square, or Place 1'' lit. Alexander Square 67

119 Hackescher Markt is ritzy, we meet there only with money though we have none, and I walk by only on my way from Alex to Friedrichs- and Oranien- in burgerstr. where I am now headed. S75 onward and I leave the well-dressed Berliners on patios below to their espresso macchiatos, their tapas114, their cocktails. Irish pub slips my mind, under west end of the station, three rooms, warm, affordable, thunder overhead. Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof115 is nucleic, not the only or even main centriole, but an important ganglion of activity. I step out of the S75, aussteigen bitte116. From the outside, this Bahnhof is all black and glass, the brick work dark maroon, near black. A work ox cleaned up for show, standing square and powerful over Friedrichstrasse itself. On a city map, this is the very centre. The station stretches glass over the street, the tether tying ox to plow. So clean as to be regal, tough enough to keep Berlin ordered, moving forward. Also imposing and threatening, memories of twisting corridors, interrogation rooms of the East Block:

Die Ttir fiel ins SchloB und Herr Lehmann war allein. Ihm war klar, dafl es fur ihn in diesem Moment nicht gerade gut aussah, tatsachlich sah es eher schlecht aus...bei diesem kleinen, kahlen Raum, in dem sich nichts befand als ein Tisch, zwei Sttihle und eine Neonrohrc.Sie stand wahrscheinlich oben in Ostberlin und wartete auf ihn, wahrend er hier unten in einem fensterlosen Raum in Bahnhof FriedrichsstraBe safl...als stifle er in einem Keller, aber eigentlich kann man das nicht wissen, dachte er, denn das viele Auf und Ab im Bahnhof FriedrichstraBe hatte seine Orientierung durcheinandergebracht (Herr Lehmann 206-7).'17

112 Hackescher Market 113 -str. or Str. - abbrev. of Strasse 114 Spanish hors d'oevres 115 train station 116 deboarding, please 117 The door locked and Herr Lehmann was alone. It was clear to him that things did not look good for him at this moment, in fact things looked bad.. .in this small, bare room in which there was nothing but a table, two chairs and a fluorescent tube.. .She was probably standing up there in East Berlin and waiting for him, while he sat down here in this room without a window in the Friedrich Street Train Station.. .as if he were in a cellar, but actually one could not be certain, he thought, with all the ups and downs in the Friedrich Street Train Station that threw off his orientation entirely. 68

Now the trains pass freely overhead under glass-paned roof, below the station is tiered with walkways at different levels and shops of all sorts: Original Thtiringer Wurstwaren, Trockenfruchte-Nusse-Marzipan - Natur oder Kandiert, 1 1 & Blumenladen, Werder Erdbeeren, das Reisezentrum, shoe stores, fast food, Asian, Italian, American, naturopathy, books, magazines, newspaper, environmental organizations - Sind Sie Tierfreund? - Ja, aber ich muss gleich weiter... - Warten Sie mal! Nur einen kleinen Moment fur die Tiere! The floors shine and the glass walls are invisible, the shops smell sweet and the toilets cost 50 Eurocents or a Euro because they are immaculate and all the doors slide open without touch. Escalators, elevators and marble stairs up and down to trains and more shops. At the far west end, three storeys below the second S75 car from the front - and that is why -1 step directly into the S1 northbound, underground, one short station away, S Oranienburgerstrasse, once brilliant orange ceramic stone walls, I rush up to street level across from Aufsturz120, over a hundred beers from the bottle, reasonably priced, haven for students of Humboldt-Universitat121 like me, 199 and Auslander like me. My Collins Pocket German Dictionary in hand:

Absturz - m - fall; (AVIAT) crash abstiirzen - vi - to fall; (A VIAT) to crash

ab as a preposition or adverb means from or off Absturz = a German word - a fall from the sky, a falling off

auf as a preposition or adverb means on(to), in or up Aufsturz is not a word but it was my favourite bar then, a meeting place, where I rushed to and fell not down but upward, a crashing upon friends and chat and drinks. Months ago I landed in the city and crashed upon this place.

Original Thuringian Sausage Wares, / Dried Fruit-Nuts-Marzipan - Natural or Candied, / Flower Shops, Werder Strawberries, the Travel Centre 119 - Are you an animal friend? - Yes, but I have to get going... / - Please wait! Just one quick moment for the animals! 120 name of a bar/restaurant on Oranienburger Street 121 Humboldt University, formerly the university of East Berlin 122 foreigners 69

27. Much dearer things - 1.12.04

So I made it to the pub/ on time/ for once/ today/ everyone else/ late/ definitely a first/ but the rest of/ the night will be/ the same./ It'll be/ me/ Krassi/ Belen/ Claire/ we're foreigners here/ and to each other/ what else/1 ask/ would bring us/ hold us/ together?/

Me and Krassi/ the closest/ of all combos/ at the table/ will joke/ and in/ brief moments/ speak quickly in English./ There's more/ bond here than/ the simple need/ to be around others/ who stick out/ with accents/ without the/ culture und/wir konnen nicht 19^ berlinern. 11 suppose/ both being guys/ non-competitive/ and perma-relaxed/ there's just no/ pressure/ and the days go by/ and by./ Now Belen will shoot Krassi/ questioning looks/ trying to pin him/ with sexist/ misogynist/ perverted/ or childish/ (childish being/ one of her favourites/ for me as well)./ Yeah/ Belen's difficult/ but wonderful/ in those moments/ she'll look me/ in the eyes/1 lose/ in mid-conversation/ my train of thought/ during moments/ of silence/ however/ she avoids/ eye to eye/ contact/ for she does/ not/ love me/ the avoidance/ of eye contact/ used to make me think/ she did/ before 1/ confessed/ and she/ rejected./

Claire and 1/ will exchange glances/ give each other/ the gun/ smile/ nod/ make friendly and/ aggressive faces/ laugh/ and look down/ at ourselves./ She has a guy/ who lives/ elsewhere/ so I keep my thoughts/ elsewhere/ he's a friend/ too/ should be here./

As Krassi and Claire/ speak in friendly tones/ Belen will take/ my cigarettes and/ count them/ uno/ dos/ tres/Fumar acorta la vida. / She'll keep tabs/ on my work/ to poison myself/ Fumar puede matar12 / and will shoot me/ a look/ asking why/ pinning me with/ disapproval/ unlike the looks/ she gives Krassi/ she truly/ disapproves of me/ my smoking/1 don't know why/ she fires at Krassi/ for she feels not/ badly of him/ but she/ burns me/ and I am left laughing with/ derision and a/ certain bitterness/ she is not my/ girlfriend/ doesn't want to be/ so no right/ to criticise/ and I wish she'd/ leave the smokes/ alone/ unless she/ wants one/ wants/ me/ fumar puede ser causa de una muerte lentay 1 7 A dolorosa .1 The beer will flow/ but slowly/ in the presence of/ these women./ Krassi will worry/ about Belen's/ thoughts of him/ and will begin/ weighing his words/ carefully/ with precision/ rolling the English/ into German/ on his Bulgarian tongue./ Claire will think/ of 177 her man/y 'espere qu 'il revient/ mais oui/ il revient toujours/ a moi I smile/ carefully around./ Belen's thoughts/ will move/ behind a wall/ (their favourite place)/ and I will not know/ where/ how/ to begin./ My mind will/ turn elsewhere/ I'll wonder/ what we'll do/ after this/ after everything/ afterall./

123 and/ we cannot speak Berliner 124 one/ two/ three/ Smoking shortens life. 125 Smoking can kill. 126 smoking can be the cause of a slow and painful death 1271 hope he comes back/ but surely/ he always comes back/ to me I've never known ahead I'd lose touch except once a high school buddy on his couch in grade twelve and I knew for a flash this would be the last I haven't seen him since. Oh Krassi it is you I miss not Belen her reproach not Claire her sweet French tongue not for the taking. Krassi we watched late movies shared beer music stories your Bulgarian accent your perfect completion of my sentences you knew me thought about me and for me. You told me there is nothing more threatening than a woman who cannot have what she wants you told me to expand my mind all I have to do is open it and you complained first the Americans stole pizza now the last samurai was American as well. Where are you Krassi? I didn't know I'd lose you. Where are the five nights a week with you hiding away in that prison room in your tower the elevator straining under weight of furniture? For a time all I had left was your armchair but I walked out on that just as you did on me and now you are a name on my screen that never responds. When our beautiful Czech friends marry I will look for you there my friend my only handhold when Berlin became too vertical and slick. 71

We'll enjoy/ the company/ why?/ We are connected/ by need/ and some kind of/ love/1 think/ I'll hope./

We'll pay/ some with tips/ some without/ some with/ much dearer things./ Krassi/ will descend/ to the train/ Claire/ will walk/ to another/ Belen and 1/ a tram/ until I leave her/ for yet another train/ another track./ I'll arrive/ home/ where I'll/ sleep/ in a bed/ alone/ staring/ my vaulted ceiling.// 72

30. Prenzlauer Berg

North of centre, north of Mitte and its museums, north of the TV tower still visible down long, wide streets, north of my years of apartments and Humboldt-Universitat, the north edge of the Ring at U+S Schonhauser Allee, perhaps nucleus of this district, Prenzlauer Berg, Ring trains east-west, trams every direction, and the U2 overhead north-south, burst upward from underground a moment past Oderbergerstr.'s intersection, above traffic now, watching. Berg is "mountain" but the streets of Prenzl. Berg are flat as Berlin and the locals tell you there is a slight grade, easier on bicycle south than north; having no bike, I tell them walking's the same either way. Prenzl. Berg where the rules change or disappear, vanish as the Iron Curtain, as East Germans unaware the Wall would soon fall, tables set, black blazers and home- sewn trousers hanging in closets, candles half burned, fully furnished and nothing, no one to pay, vanished, like the Soviet Zone and the Berlin Wall remaining only in pieces at Bernauer Strasse, remaining but changed, and the Soviets now Russians, now living in apartments along Schonhauser Allee with cars and taxes to call their own, no longer posted with tanks and Kalashnikovs, Wladimir Kaminer documented his parting with Mother Russia in Militarmusik (2003), now runs Russendisko at Kaffee Burger, Torstrasse 58/60, Russian ska as loud as he likes, writes in German, his young family Berliner and Russian and Western. Rules change as the district has, no more occupied buildings, the squatters have all moved east, the punks moved east, struggling artists east, and students shifting east, in come the young business people, their ritz and costly suits, and the buildings all given facelifts. / 7R Sanierungsinitiativen clean the place up, renovate the former East, colour to black & white photos, as many bananas as you can carry, smooth glass of new windows, learn English at The Wall Street Institute, Schonhauser Allee 124, shopping mall at U+S Schonhauser with a McDonald's. Prenzl. Berg, one of first to see lower income leave, punks and artists to Friedrichshain during the 90s and now toward Lichtenberg and other districts outside the eastern confines of the Ring, or protection of, depending. The cranes have come to Friedrichshain and the dumpsters are filling with dust and rock fragments, pieces of the Berlin Wall somehow still available in every gift shop and tourist corner since 1989, the dumpsters know what to keep safe, know how to spray one edge neon and call valuable. But the rules, back to the rules and how they change or disappear in Prenzlauer Berg, how the night allows many things if not anything, and how I took refuge there, sat on the Ml0 for 21 minutes from U Warschauer Strasse to U Eberswalder Strasse, evening flight from Friedrichshain, from Kreuzberg, from Neukolln, and other places I could afford to live. M10 travels a short stint north, nestled in treed, green meridian dissecting the Warschauer, over Karl-Marx Allee's imitation of Moscow, roundabout Bersarinplatz cobblestones and Fiesta Pepe's hot dungeon dancefloor in the

Restoration Initiatives 73

Rigaer, north to Landsberger Allee / Petersburger Strasse, intersection strung up with power lines, tram lines, traffic lights, street lamps, crossing signals, buzzers, beepers, horns, and tram bells giving a moment's notice. This is where we cross into Prenzlauer Berg, and there is no change at first, then the M10 veers northwest and the street widens, the meridian sheds its green, becomes a double centre lane framed by guardrails, trees keep to sidewalks, seem to shrink as the buildings grow fifth, even sixth, floors, the street becomes the Danziger, broad and strong, intersections only second thoughts, fleeting chances to join or abandon, the M10 doesn't screech anymore, it barrels ahead, it rolls, rolls past Caro's old red room above the Telecafe, over Greifswalder Strasse where I once debarked for Belen in the tiny Chodowiecki side street, neither of us able to pronounce Polish, over the Prenzlauer Allee where Jane redid an apartment for cheaper rent and a baby in her future, to Schonhauser Allee where we roll under U Eberswalder to final destination in front of the Doner place, Doner for a Euro once, opening specials a memory now, and I'm here. Steps beyond this end stop, a head shop, and finally the rules change as promised, I walk in, ask for mushroom chocolate at the counter, a Kit Kat sized bar packaged in plain white cardboard placed in front of me by frowning store owner, 20 Euros. Take a compass, the sharp point at the bottom of U Eberswalder steps, trace a radius of 500 metres, perfect circle within which moments spring forth, vignettes from the deep, slow-cycling, once volcanic seas of my past:

Hakuna Matata, kiosk stand below overhead tracks, meeting place, standard, our compass point. Bob Marley blaring above vendor's head. We buy Cigarettes: Nil, Lucky Strikes, F6, Gauloises, Marlboro, Gitanes... Tobacco: American Spirit, Drum... and Papers: Rizzla, Zig Zag... Beer 0.5L: Berliner Pilsner, Sternburg, Beck's, Kostritzer, Flensburger, Krombacher, Warsteiner, Bitburger, Radeberger, stop... English Mag: Exberliner Newspapers: Berliner Zeitung , Der Tagesspiegel , B.Z. - Berlins groflte Zeitung131 (tabloid), and the FAZ132 and Stiddeutsche Zeitung1 3 remained beyond me. The City Magazines: Zitty and Tip134 We crack open bottles, light our smokes, dance reggae between Berliners rushing down from the train home.

129 lit. Berliner Newspaper 130 lit. The Day's Mirror 131 lit. B.Z. - Berlin's biggest newspaper. It is important to differentiate between this tabloid-like paper and the Berliner Zeitung which began as the newspaper of East Berlin and continues today as one of two main newspapers in the city, the other being Der Tagesspiegel, which was the newspaper of West Berlin. 132 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [lit. Frankfurt General Newspaper] 133 lit. South German Newspaper 134 Berlin's two city magazines, featuring Berlin-specific culture and social-scene news; feature articles on all subjects, events and occurrences defining of Berlin; and perhaps most importantly, bi-weekly schedules for all concert, club, cinema, radio, museum, and television events in and around Berlin. 74

Meet me at Hakuna Matata. I'll wave to you from the passing M10, mouthing I'm here! Wait for me! I know, I'm late again...

Eastward on Danziger, 100m, left up Lychenerstr., constant dusk, trees hang thick, 200m on the left, "Bar 23" we called it, because five thick vertical bars shone yellow against old brick II III beside the heavy door. Krassi and I, eyes twisting magic pulsations, the chocolate swilled with beer at Hakuna, our nails picking at mushroom teeth. Dingy black inside lit red - common motif, low broken tables, cracked plastic or vinyl chairs, occupied, we take to the barstools, the bartender friendly, good server, she ignores us in between. Our routine: beer on route, Doner and chocolate where we meet, beer on foot, a pack of cigarettes, 18 or so each at II III between 1:00 and 5:00 a.m. Conversation constant and unremembered, psychedelic pinwheel spins behind bar beside a crazed Jesus, tongue stuck out, huge shades covering whirlpool eyes, and the wall is water, tiny bubbles escape upward, Another please, my lady, so long as the bubbles keep on. Importantly there is no clock, and no rush on her face. Krassi back from the toilet tells me: I tried opening the door as someone came out, a man, dark hair and serious, I moved out of his way as he disappeared back inside. I tried again, he too, and we backed off. Another try and we were perfectly in sync, trains opposite direction, same track, again. Laughter behind me then and I realized, door to toilet to my left further down, I realized standing staring at myself in a full- length mirror. Girls at table behind me, peeking around my reflection, I gotta get outta my way.

A sober night at II III, the bar not on shrooms spins the same and the bubbles keep on. I tell Belen we are not children and she can stop, I leave for the toilet. Krassi alone at the table upon return says: Tell her tonight, tell her, she knows, wants to hear it, guaranteed, wishes it so, says we're children because we don't just come out with it. She returns, frowning, we 75 leave, Krassi ascends to train, I give Belen a page of my journal to read: .. .this secret.. .1 cannot stop thinking.. .those days I spend with Belen not able to.. .feel her breath inside me.. .an air of caring.. .saying hello and saying goodbye.. .her lips.. .on my cheek.. .and as we switch to opposite cheeks, our lips pass each other and how badly do mine want to.. .1 can't read her.. .communicate.. .in ways we never have... 9-10.11.04 Shakes her head, increasingly as she nears the final full stop. I do the same on the M10 after her stop.

Beyond II III, the corner of Lychener and Raumerstr., southwest corner of Helmholtzplatz - playgrounds and sand, park one block across and two long. Couples pushing strollers, the student population of Prenzlauer Berg breaks here for young families, the voices of children, parents speaking soft, liquid German undo my memories of WWII films, the hard spitting and rrrr's of the Third Reich. Birds are here and the sky opens for the sun, the trees tall, the young faces flush. Lay on your back, eyes closed and leave the city. Sweet grass in the air, the field behind my elementary school. The square stretches from Lychenerstr., cuts off Schliemann, and ends at Dunckerstr. Ah, you've been to LSD corner, Janette said to me once. I didn't like that, so I said, No.

Compass point, southwest down Kastanien Allee135, Sparkasse, literally Save+Cashpoint, my bank first on the left, I only withdraw everything, on days the stipend pays. The deposit machine I never use, drops its steel jaw, throw in loose bills if you got 'em, jaw snaps shut, it'll count them, reward itself by swallowing. Across An Einem Sonntag Im August , cafe with cheapest Sunday breakfast buffet (though I've never made it in August), nude portraits hung, XXX readings Thursday evenings, and a black coffee is a full glass mug of espresso&water, strong enough the spoon hums, the tattoos, smoke hanging, Victorian-perhaps lounging furniture, swinging benches and uneven tables under umbrellas bouncing fallen chestnuts. Nearby next door, a human-sized hotdog stands on sidewalk in high-top sneakers squirting ketchup on his head from right hand, left side of face scrunched up in personified concentration, tongue on upper lip, left mustard eyebrow raised and mustard bottle in left hand. Customers tie

lit. Chestnut Boulevard lit. On one Sunday in August 76 their dogs to his feet. Across the street is Prager now, spacious outdoor courtyard, warehouse dance parties surround. A factory of sorts in ruins makes for busy weekends and I saw WorldCup '06 games on massive displays, more spectators than chairs and benches. The first street and right, Oderbergerstr. looks similar with overhanging branches obstructing the other side. Across and hidden by thick over­ grown hedges is Nemo with its interior walls, painted murals of the gods pouring nectar down from the clouds like rain into the mouths of men. The Bulgarian bartender, tattooed, black hair, her thin figure that pries my mouth open, she speaks to Krassi and returns to bar counter, Krassi translates, he's ordered and asked where she's from, a foreign place I cannot pronounce or spell, but so familiar to him, I more foreign than he at this table, and I ask him for phrases, my Bulgarian incomprehensible when she returns.

Flashback: From Kastanien Allee, left on Oderberger, a gallery not far on left side. Jana had filled the room with her dolls made from scraps, junk perhaps, but reconciled through re-use. Hagen, Claudia and I went to see them, bottle cap eyes, potato chip bag dresses, mini cereal box bodies, but they didn't look like kindergarten crafts and I cannot say why. Speculate: they were made on purpose, each piece carefully selected, diamonds in the rough, no messes of glue, teacher telling her not to put it in her mouth, Jana made these, she chose to do this, saw life in the kitchen bin and created art. This was the night before I flew home for Christmas, 2004.1 gave Claudia and Hagen a card outside, had written "closest friends" and "important" inside, "support" and "thankful." In the New Year, Hagen told me how much that meant.

A distant memory: Geraldine's white apartment on Knaackstr., instead of left onto Lychener, I crossed the Danziger and turned right, her place on the left down 100m or so. The carpets were so white, soft as toilet paper ads, her alabaster complexion foreshadow at the door. We lounged on those floors, I carefully, nervously sipped at red wine, the immaculacy of the table, lamps and futon all waxen put me warm in the ice hotel I'd seen once near Quebec City, and I thought, this is not Berlin. No, this was high life in Switzerland, Geraldine's Swiss Francs taking more than care of her, it's all so cheap here...for me, she'd say, I glanced around for ivory and diamonds, but they must have been in the other room. I visited her once there before she disappeared, her wan presence drifted with the clouds. Those white walls washed, preserved by her possessive boyfriend, my only guess.

Mauerpark137 is found at furthest western edge of our circle, 500m down Eberswalder beyond the head shop. Helmholtzplatz could squeeze in eight times. But not many families, mostly punks, students, young people sitting on patchy grass, stubbing out rollies in the dirt and sipping drinks warmed by the sun. The park racked by crowds, not pretty, not natural, trees smallish and bent, large graffitied stone blocks in various positions beside the long path up eastern edge, they form tiny amphitheatres for bongo players, that's how you know it's summer in Berlin, the parks fill with bongos, as if the fields compete with loud beating hearts, and Hagen can't stand it. I was here once with Krassi, carefully placing the bottle in right side of mouth, left side newly pierced in the Wisbyer Str., northeast of here, a heavily trafficked throughway, the only time I was there, for a piercing shop I'd researched and found, website emphasized sanitation over Berlin craziness, had gained recognition from Berlin Health Department, Nightliner Tattoo & Piercing, needle through, captive bead in my lip. Also at the Mauerpark once for May Day party, May 1st, German Labour Day, Prenzlauer Berg and Kreuzberg host to seas of bobbing heads in the streets, labour unions and parties, political campaigns and activities, since 1987 May Day in Berlin known for heavy rioting by radical leftists, extremist punks, overturn police cars, set cars ablaze. 1990s, riots left politics, far left broken, people just want to provoke the police, teenagers throwing glass bottles and rocks. The day for partying, but at dusk the riot

lit. Wall Park 78 police in lines with plastic shields, and I looked up, saw the glass and rocks flying through the air like a spray of water caught in sunlight, and we ran out, as rioters and cops ran in, 2004.

Upon returning for 5 weeks in summer 2008:

Wed, July 2. 2008:1 think back to this day a week later and am annoyed that once again, I let my journal slip for so long.. .But today I'll catch this up so that my memories don't fade, so that I have material for my poem, and so that, should anyone wish one day in the somewhat distant future, someone can potentially read this and tunnel into my experience and thought over the course of time I manage to keep this up. It is a struggle between writing openly, everything, trusting no one will ever see this, and writing only what others can find out without fear of judgment or hurt feelings. This journal is somewhere in between. I'm always writing too much and too little.

This aft. I sat at An Einem Sonntag Im August for almost 4 hours and wrote in this journal and watched people go by. Lots of women with big, dark sunglasses and tapering jeans (usu. black or grey), tight down to the ankles, walking with effeminate men wearing scarves round their necks and shaggy hair. I saw a guy walking with crutches and only one leg, the other leg of his jeans hung empty without a shoe at the bottom. Muscular arms of course. Good looking, round 30,1 wonder what happened. I love this cafe, always did, they used to have loads of nude art & portraits on the walls and host erotic readings. After, I met Antje at a Tapas restaurant [corner of Lychener /Raumer]. I hate Tapas, always expensive for nothing. I ordered a cheese dish and got 5 thin slices of normal tasting cheese alone on a plate for €3.60...

Heard a lady this aft. tutoring a Spanish girl in English. She was British and told the girl that Wiese is "a piece of grass".. .1 found that funny. Sounded like a piece of ass! and I would say "green area" or "small field." [Literally "grassland," "hayfield," or "meadow," but parts of Mauerpark and Helmholtzplatz are referred to as a Wiese - not big enough for the literal translation, smaller, but larger than "a piece."] 79

33. Going Home for Christmas from "The day picked me" and "Two weeks from yesterday" - 7.12.04

Could have slept another hour, the kids didn't show again, my lessons the teachers deem optional. The teachers, public servants who get a permanent contract and that's life, that school, for life. The desire to reach out to students, will to accept new colleagues, use an assistant, not there. Someone wrote an application to have a native English assistant, successful, but no follow-up plan, no use and I sit reading Beautiful Losers in staffroom, counting minutes.

If I could go home... but travel's an hour one-way, I stay till end of the afternoon.

But I can't write really angry right now - I'm happy today. Rare to sit in the train and it seems the day picked me, filled me warm as a mouthful of coffee, perfect temperature, down my throat to chest, heated inside and through.

I've got it inside today.

As if it'll never go away I smiled on that train and even sitting here in this staffroom, long hours with the hum of an empty room, can't help think of the daylight outside, I am alive.

Two week countdown to Canadian Christmas. 80

Home again after only three and a half months and it'll be cold, white as the classroom boards clean of our markers, our teachings.

Main celebration in Germany the 24 , how it hurt to be invited last year for the 25l, Dresden girlfriend, the denouement.

Christmas Day in Canada with family, ham buns and rum the evening before. Mom smiles with her eyes and dad chooses his words, wraps them with care. Adrian's uncensored jokes work in English, translated in Berlin, I'm always laughing hardest. Carta's strong opinions fit best in Berlin, as if part of her grew up schlagfertig wie die Berliner , and Aunt Theresa laughs because she has for a moment of time, no schedule, no routine, coffee in the den when Christmas lights go on, our rum and eggnog in the morning.

Back to church after nearly two years, Father I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.

Gifts open to reactions I know and expect like the dent in my pillow, the taste of my toothpaste, the smell of mom's hair.

Last year in Dresden, the formalities, formal addresses tended to keep me quiet. Siezen, nicht dutzen, mein Bruder doch, und seine Freundin, aber auf keinen Fall die Eltern, auch wenn sie dich anlacheln, wenn sie dir die Hand geben und sagen dass du willkommen bist. Und der Messer und das Gabel, weiB du noch? 11Q Hab dir alles erkldrt undgezeigt... Make me invisible like every thought I don't translate, comments I don't make, jokes, well...

quick-witted as the Berliners Use formal addresses, never familiar, / except with my brother, and / his girlfriend, but never / with my parents, even if they smile at you, / if they shake your hand and say / that you are welcome. / And the knife and fork, remember? /1 explained it all to you and showed you... 81

the list goes on longer than Santa's.

This December back to conversation. My admission: I've stopped trying in German, I am my quiet self, returned from Jr. High years, silence winning out under second language circumstances.

I am scared of 2005, but I see my family before then and I'm grateful. 43. Tod140

Tod, title of the last art installation in the Palace of the Republic. Death to the Palast der Republik. "Dead Family" greeting at the entrance: mother, father, late 30s. Boy, 5, girl, 8. My guesses. Dead when the artist dressed them, grey sweat suits, silver duct tape sealing the cuffs, what do wrists and ankles have to say? No make-up other than white powder on skin settling when no longer exhaled away. Bodies on concrete. A photograph: rubbery skin, wiry hair, and grey area. I went to see it three times, and paid.

FRAKTALE IV tod 83

47. Krossener 7, Friedrichshain - moving out

Heavy, wooden double doors of my building - large enough to drive a truck through, an LKW - ein Lastkraftwagen141 - load and strength sum up function of such vehicle. An LKW bears the load of the strong and weak, the not-strong-enough. I was strong enough once - strong enough to leave everything behind, everything I couldn't carry sold to a girl's abusive Russian boyfriend - verbal mostly. I shouldn't know, but she was my roommate's niece, and my roommate talked. "Are the curtains included?" he asks me. "Yeah, they're worth the 70 Euros alone so, what?" Seventy Euros = all of my things, furniture I used, proudly borne home from IKEA in the south end - newest of three in the city. Seventy Euros = foam futon - fire red cover & grey metal frame I bought for 200€ = desk, white, terrible time screwing it together for 100€ = those curtains, navy blue, ceiling to floor 12 ft. - really only 45€ = large shelf without teetering piles of T-shirts and socks - 35€ = four armchairs - all free, but all hauled up 82 stairs on my back = TV - free, never watched, I didn't care = TV stand - not mine - emptied of incense and loose papers = full-length mirror, never broke in the move, my good luck - 30€ = desk chair, broken - 10€ from a friend before it was broken = scratched coffee table, wax and cigarette butt stains - 10€ = that room - priceless memories staring up at vaulted ceiling = roommates of whom I mighta paid to be free = the deal I make him to take it all off my hands. Cash in hand, I needn't pay Robben & Vintges for an LKW; come out even. Nothing holding me down, holding me back, holding me there. I pick up my heavy bags, head in the kitchen for one last deep breath of cold smoke, cold tea leaves, years of unwashed wood, and the gas oven. Out the door my bags slouch over eighty-two steps down and I'm on the street again, my two feet on the ground.

141 a semi, or truck trailer; lit. load-strength-truck; LKW pronounced EL-KAH-VAY 84

48. Kreuzberg

Dann aber weiter, ermahnte er sich, wenn man sich alleine besduft, muB man in Bewegung bleiben (274). Herr Lehmann, Sven Regener

No compass point here, no anchor, I kept moving, Kreuzberg divided, two postal codes pre-Reunification, in former SO 36 I began, 2003, ended up in SO 61, 2006. Those old codes, mental landmarks, memory's streetlamps for drunken Kreuzbergers stumbling before and after sun-up, for me a start and finish line.

Kreuzberg not so popular in West Berlin, stabbing into the East with so many streets chopped off by the Wall sudden as the guillotine on three sides of this district. The '80s, young and lost, artists and punks (so often found together, no money, leftist, night owls), cheap rent, bartend, drink your earnings like Herr Lehmann143, and no mandatory military service for West Berliners, reward for maintaining an island of the West behind Iron Curtain, British/French/ American Sectors need populace, a life raft of Western values, only if Western life is there, and West Berlin survived precariously, wondering when the Wall might close in.

And between Kreuzberg 36 and 61,1 lived in Berlin, at first among foreigners who, like me, thought, this is Germany, but Berlin is not Germany and Germany is not Berlin, we were told and came to know. This is Berlin, where I lived, this is Berlin I write of, and I am Berliner.

Out my first open window, the Wranglestrasse near U-bahn station Schlesisches Tor (impossible acrobatics for the English tongue), not a German word to be heard. Workers to West Berlin from Turkey, followed by families, having families, extended, immediate, big; Kreuzberg is now Little Istanbul, densest Turkish population outside Istanbul. The men stand outside their shops, the women lean out apartment windows, propped up on pillows, soften hard window ledge, yell greetings down to passersby, stop long and smiling in the street. Children on playgrounds and the mixing of language; German-sounding Turkish, Turkish- sounding German, and the growing concern these kids

But then continue on, he warned himself, if one is to get drunk on his own, he must keep moving, main character of Sven Regener's Herr Lehmann (2001). 85 have no mother tongue.

The Doner shops at the Schlesisches corner 24 hours, Borek mit Kase oder Fleisch144 displayed at the sidewalk windows, glassless as if with enough of home, only a Turkish winter might come. Kaiser's145 at the corner of Wrangel and Falckenstein has vegetables and fruit on tables slanted toward the street along its outside walls like an outdoor market; not unique to this corner or this shop, but here is the feeling of bazaar, a man shouting that all is fresh, all well-priced, all must go.

First night here, a Kofte146 for supper from the corner of Wrangel and Cuvry, the menu mounted above counter, back-lit and I not understanding a word. It looked like meat and tasted like grease, I took it to Lars's apartment, ate it and decided to learn food words, Imbiss147 menu words, meats and toppings, bread, pita, sauces, the word for "spicy" in German is scharf as in "sharp." Smart. No need to ask, "Is it hot hot or spicy hot?" Spicy food vs. sharp knives, not so often confused.

I left the Wrangelkiez148 for Germany, my plan; this isn't German, I thought, having not yet really arrived in Berlin149. My apartment search to all areas, any room for €250/month, anything included, and I would go, but the winner took me through Gorlitzer Park on foot and I stayed in SO 36 for ten months. Claudia, Christoph and I, Reichenberger 59, one stop west of Schlesisches Tor to U Gorlitzer Bhf150, faster to walk from the Wrangelkiez, the subways two to four streets north of my rooms.

Reichenberger room in back corner of apartment, lower ceiling I wonder why, little light through cargo elevator shaft, smallish. Roommates with better rooms, friends, so I lived in the kitchen, centrally located, quick and easy connections to nourishment, bathroom and laundry facilities,

Borek with cheese or meat - Borek is a Turkish delicacy: a long roll of puff pastry, perhaps 10x4x1 inches, filled most often with goat cheese or ground beef. 145 German supermarket chain 146 Another Turkish delicacy: similar to a large, deep-fried meat ball, often served in Turkish bread or pita. 147 fast food stand or snack bar, applied widely also to any sort of stand-and-eat food stop Kiez, or -kiez as suffix, is particular to Berlin. It means neighbourhood, or that area within a city district that one lives, feels at home, grocery shops, etc. The word does not exist in southern Germany, and in other areas of northern Germany it tends to have a negative, unclean meaning, e.g. in Hamburg, "Kiez" refers specifically to the red light district. 149 In German, one says that someone "ist noch nicht richtig angekommen," literally "has not yet really arrived" meaning that that person has not yet figured out the area or settled in with some knowledge of the area. 150 lit. Gorlitzer train station. Though called a train station, it is an elevated subway stop on the UI line. language practice, social scene, coffee maker, and the exit.

On the town, my Auslander group four nights a week at least. Arrive home at dawn, sleep the sun away, rise after dusk, new cigarette pack from outdoor corner vending machine across the street at Reichenberger and Lausitzer, once hit the blue Gauloises151 button, head spun on those strong smokes like that night in grade 10, chewing tobacco twisting till I puked. Red vs. blue in the dark, unclear, party nights untethered to the weekend become one long sunless high before the crash, and I crashed.

Torkeln is the right word = stagger, totter, lurch, careen, homeward body ricocheting off unforgiving building walls, my own toes too widespread not to step on, wallet stolen twice from sleeping pocket on late city trains, headphones still stuck in ears, jack dangling, swinging musicless and exposed between my legs. Claudia and Hagen saw me, my slouched back slumping forward toward home in zig zags, they knew they were too late to interrupt, the Rote Harfe 1 S9 bartender on Heinrichplatz had already done so by waking my sleeping face, mouth open on Shampoo Planet, hand still gripping my half-litre and it was only 11:30pm. Hagen and Claudia chuckle and serious, made sure I didn't fall backward down eight flights, I realized they were in the apartment as I slid all magnets off the fridge with my chest and right cheek, Claudia helped me up, Hagen's reassuring words, Christoph pulled shoes off my unconscious feet and closed the door. If one is to get drunk on his own, he must keep moving, and be moving to start, I'd had too much wine and Jager with Adrian over the phone, the evening it hit me - the expanse between autumn and spring, my pallid face, the Atlantic. Claudia gone by EuroCup '04, Antje and I took the Ul/15 Gorlitzer Bhf, over Schlesisches Tor where the subway line ended pre-Reunification, to Warschauerstr., Friedrichshain, north of us geographically, East and walled-off in recent 1 H history. To Stereo 33 on Krossenerstrasse, the big screen in the back room. Always late arriving, Claudia saved seats if she could, we squinted through sports fan cheering and hanging smoke in projector light to find her. Standard lmbiss -

151 Blue Gauloises are the stronger variety cigarette; red Gauloises are lighter. 152 Rote Harfe (lit. Red Harp) is a bar on Heinrichplatz (lit. Heinrich Square) 153 a bar on Krossener Street, Friedrichshain 87

Pommes Frites €1.20 Curry Wurst €1.20 Hamburger €1.70 Toast €1.20 Sternburg 6er Pack Biere ab €3.50 KAFFEE €0.50 Latte Macchiato Cappuccino heiper Kakao Tee Gluhwein154 - across from standard convenience kiosk under the tracks of elevated Gorlitzer. Nearby a woman sells incense, nostrils see her before eyes. Naga Champa155, the odd sensation of closeness in the outdoors, the claustrophobia of handmade craft and import shops brought to the open air. A man in same area selling used tickets on the stairs up, above the incense lady not her smoke; his English is perfect when he hears my imperfect German. His living: Arrive Gorlitzer - give him your ticket, whatever's left of 2 hours travel; Depart Gorlitzer - don't pay €2.20, give him a Euro, ride out the last 30 minutes of validity. Another, a regular on the UI between Gorlitzer and Schlesisches Tor back and forth; before he was just gone one day, he played his guitar, sang through missing teeth, and grinned wide at the passengers, let there be life on the train!, in Spanish, English, and German scrambled. His songs, excerpts one or two minutes long between stations, thin plastic vending machine cup to collect coins up and down the cars before debarking: Mucho gusto, ladies, ladies, mujeres, meine Damen und Herr en! 1 S7 The Zitty magazine full-length feature photo of him, their regular die stadt bin ich photo and caption. Long, narrow face, black toque pulled down over eyebrows above black eyes, long nose, serious expression set up by pursed lips between thick, dark, mutton chops and long wavy dark hair. Blackout backdrop hung behind city sidewalk cobblestones and sewer grate on which he stands in heavy, black combat boots at the bottom of baggy, grey cargo pants. Behind his guitar slung

154 French fries; German curry sausage; hamburger; toast; Sternburg 6-pack beer starting €3.50; COFFEE; Latte Macchiato; cappuccino; hot cocoa; tea; hot wine 155 a type/scent of incense 156 My pleasure, ladies, ladies, ladies, my ladies and gentlemen! 157 One of two Berlin city magazines (the other is Tip), featuring Berlin-specific culture and social-scene news; feature articles on all subjects, events and occurrences defining of Berlin; and perhaps most importantly, bi-weekly schedules for all concert, club, cinema, radio, museum, and television events in and around Berlin. 158 lit. "the city is me"; also understood as "I am the city" 88 across, ready to play, he wears an army fatigue vest draped over a black leather bomber jacket, black hoodie underneath, over a black T-shirt, a wooden cross hanging from black leather cord around his neck between the open zippers. His right hand rests on the guitar's widest point, his left held up and open in an immortalized, paralyzed hello, an open eye drawn in black on his palm, skull and cross bones in white over the heart of his green camo vest. Guitar covered in stickers, cartoons resemble the graffiti of Kreuzberg streets, protests like the large Golden Arches with McCancer written across, some robot men, metal music, and the sticky jokes too: IV EVIL BEAVER. The caption below tells us: Ignacio, 36. Geboren in Lugo/Spanien. Musiker. In Berlin seit 1989. Welche Orte sind fur Sie Berlin? Die Strecke unter der Hochbahn zwischen Gorlitzer Bahnhof und Schlesischem Tor. Was vermissen Sie in Berlin? Das Meer und die Warme. Wo waren Sie noch nie in Berlin? An vielen, vielen Orten. Berlin ist... Dynamik.159 zitty 22/2003 Left out my door, first right down Lausitzerstr., next left onto Weinerstr. to Gorlitzer Bhf, 300m total, if that, as the crow flies. Halfway down Lausitzer, left hand side, a window display:

SURGERY TO WEAR 030 68087703 KLEJDERKUNST160 black type on orange strip across the bottom, one and a half mannequins differently-, partially-clothed over time. Two scenes:

1. long-stemmed red roses line window front bottom, blooms craned toward human figures, tiny doll fallen on her side in white princess dress and golden antennae under tall twist of thorny rose vine and palm branches up display's right side, left side: slender female bare feet and ankles, caramel tights mid-calf up to... long forest green coat, open but for one button at chest level, diamond-crossed stitching like inside liners of other jackets, material appears heavy and warm, running long down backside into tux-like tails striped black and white, underneath, copper top, shiny as new penny, laced up with black cords like a loose corset, her right sleeve visible, long, ribbed, navy blue and green striped rings around her arm, her bare scalp looks out over my

Ignacio, 36. Born in Lugo, Spain. Musician. In Berlin since 1989. Which places are Berlin to you? The strip under the elevated train tracks between Gorlitzer Bahnhof und Schlesisches Tor. What do you miss in Berlin? The sea and warm weather. Where haven't you been in Berlin? To many, many places. Berlin is... Dynamic. 160 clothing art 89

shoulder, the other half-figure, torso and head only, dead centre, topless, smooth, hard nipple-less breasts, her head and neck concealed by twisted, black and green striped chiffon scarf over shapes of a hidden face mask, flipper-like gills beside the eyes, humanoid sea creature with red, female lips, plastic eyes in holes cut out, a queen's crown, golden, tilted to the left, one and a half women framed by green leaves, ruling over an Amazon warmth insulated behind glassy reflections of Berlin clouds over blank-windowed facades across. (Summer 2008)

2. one and a half women angled away so their noses are lost behind profile of cheek bone, as if looking at each other, chatting in side glances, they wait for their order, you're next in line, waiting at display's backdrop of closed white blinds, two evergreens in bottom right corner straining to mid shin, but half-woman has no legs, her upper half in tank top, black & white checkerboard kaleidoscope, stationed atop pedestal clothed in same twisting pattern, from podium top to tank top bottom, a black slice of underwear bisects her wan hip and waist, no left arm, empty metal socket facing glass, no wig but two spikes, one silver one gold, pierce upward from cranium; gold spear held in right hand concealed between body and blinds, inanimate companion to the left, taller, full-figured, boasts long legs, ideal in their dis­ proportion, up to perfect cheeks, thin hips, flat stomach and those inflexible, inhuman breasts, all visible under diaphanous black nylon held away from the body by full-length, black wire coil, like a boa constrictor practicing for fuller figures to come, her imitation of a flawless, feminine back is covered by a stiff heart of charcoal feathers, cupid wings in cinders, and lifeless, she too holds a golden spear and at her feet, stands an ivory bear, wearing a gold spike for a crown. (Winter 2004)

Weinerstrasse fire station, painted black with muralled flames, sharp licks around window frames, garage doors, entrance arch, tonguing outside oxygen. People created in paint mouth hesitant hellos, grin weak welcomes, honest eyes open wide, moist, still. These painted folk know the heat of static, curled, orange spikes. Caricature firemen frozen in confident leaps, handfuls of hose full of solutions, fat brushes of smoke smudge building top, dried before taken to air. Thanks to the Pizza Shop guys, 2002, sprayed lettering, two feet high in bottom right corner, bordering 90 on said Pizza Shop, pizza cheap rather than artistic. So the fire station in eternal flame, burning silently for the return of engines delivering heart attack wails at every oncoming intersection. I prefer a short blast of panic as emergency vehicles violate the calm of red lights. The long discharge of Canadian sirens on return journeys around the volume knob, from station to danger, would amount to cacophonous chaos in big Berlin. Sudden explosion of forewarning sound pollution, then quiet along the sidewalked streets is best. Keep an eye for their approach, clasp hands tight over ears, protect your hearing from hemorrhage, the men of the mural on Wienerstrasse will do the rest.

S036, punk bar concert room of Oranienstrasse (continuation of Wienerstrasse past Gorlitzer), visible from Heinrich Platz (crammed with its bicycles locked to lamposts, trees, outdoor tables, and dogs tied to the bikes beside cars parked unlevel on curbs, trees pouring over coffee drinkers for attention, shop entrances, chiming incessant) a few doors north, Carla and I pick up pace to scalp my ex's ticket. S036, as diverse as the area whose postal code it claimed from the old system, as loud as ears cannot take, as packed as bodies can squeeze, as progressive as music declares, as dark as leather jackets paying cover, as sticky as floors of a brewery, as graffitied as conservative nightmares, as traditional as the 20th century succumbing to 21st, as rough as an elbow turning my little sister's eye black, as tough as she is, standing up after a fist to the stomach knocks her down, as sweaty as our jeans soaked dark blue, as colourful as our bodies' splotched bruises, as angry as my ex when I kept her ticket, told her not to come, as exhausting as Carla and I walking home on buckling knees, the nausea of overexertion. We saw the Distillers at S036, the day Carla arrived - Feb. 17, 2004, and we jumped and moshed and shouted amid arms crooked as coat hangers, elbow mallets, fists of encouragement, and stomping boots we pulled one another out from underneath. Brother and sister holding hands, we didn't want to lose each other, in any sense of the word "lose."

We walked back along Oranien, under elevated tracks, along Wiener, bars along the way: Bateau Ivre Rote Harfe Zum Elefanten161 Hannibal Wiener Blut Weisse Traube162 Travolta Wild at Heart

' Drunken Boat; Red Harp; At the Elephant's >2 Viennese Blood; White Grape 91

Morena Madonna full of patrons, we limped past.

Only occurred how I missed it in 36 once long gone to 61, the Bergmannkiez, I could list the cafes: Cafe Bergmann Kaffee am Meer163 Atlantic Cafe Milagro Knofi Marheineke Markthalle164 and the restaurants, but the bars are different, not as rough or progressive, they're greener, cleaner and more expensive, avoid Bar Nou, cocktail bar below street level, unless your pockets stuffed for prices far above street level: Hemingway Sour 9€.

Didn't quite "lose" 36, returned with guests for massive Hawaiian burger at Hannibal, the guacamole on our chins, dripping down shirt sleeves, and the melting wax of Madonna, the angry waitresses of Morena, the claustro-narrowness of Wiener Blut room, paper lanterns of Bateau Ivre, the entire poem painted on the wall, and the prices, always good, those prices though as visitor now, not my home after July 2004, but I'll take you there.

Return to Kreuzberg, February 2006, after 18 months in Friedrichshain, after the red of Krossener apartment's bathroom spread to living room, to the eyes of my roommates, to our bank accounts; after a year of Assistant English, the high school an hour to the northwest; after affairs, drugs, clubs, separation; after the depravity of the final six months was capped by her, a new woman, seeming alleviation, but only a stopper. Friedrichshain was Other, I fit in, the taste of nourishment until expiration date turns the milk sour, and if the milk won't leave, you have to.

Though happy when first in 61, never liked it as a 36er:

Aus Kreuzberg 61 wollte er so schnell wie moglich wie­ der raus, das deprimierte ihn immer, und durch Neukolln, und sei es nur das Meine Sttick Biirkner str a fle, das er auf dem Hinweg hatte nehmen mtissen, wollte er schon gar nicht mehr gehen, das war noch schlimmer, deshalb war das Kottbusser Tor die beste Losung, es war nicht weit dahin, und dort gab es einige gute ttirkische Restaurants (Herr Lehmann 231).

163 Cafe on the Sea; 164 a market hall toward the east end of Bergmann Street 165 He wanted to get back out of Kreuzberg 61 as fast as possible, it depressed him, and to pass through Neukolln, even just that tiny stretch of Biirkner Street that he would have to take on the way back, he didn't 92

Out my Reichenberger door right, and right again onto Ohlauerstrasse to the Landwehrkanal166 one block south, nowhere do trees droop so far, touch the slow moving water with branches and top leaves, the green so thick on the boughs, length of canal looks walled in by mossy monoliths, on the canal boat you troll into rectangular mirror image, four strips: living green left and right, monochrome water reflecting aqua sky, four sideways triangles extending to an end point far away, touching tips. How it looks also from Ohlauer Bridge, standing there, pleading with camera settings to catch the symmetry.

Across the Ohlauer Bridge is a thorn of Neukolln167 in Kreuzberg's side, similar diversity but poorer demographic and the slim Burknerstrasse is held in obscurity by the tall towers crowding inward as if to block this crossing between 36 and 61. One block to Kottbusser Damm and Kreuzberg reentered. But I hold a special place for Neukolln, U8's Boddinstrasse and Neisestrasse, salvation by Gudrun and Wernfried away in Barcelona, their apartment, my last home before taking flight.

Words of Herr Lehmann: Neukolln's worse than SO 61, we'll take boredom and family life over crime and desperation, Bergmannkiez over Ein-Euro Jobs168, Hartz IV169 and stempeln gehen170. Before the Rutli- Schule171, Berlin ignored Neukolln, underclass, the substrata city story.

Bergmannkiez: First time in her empty apartment after Christmas social, the school we both worked at. Empty because she didn't live there, but elsewhere I never saw, my swollen party eyes glanced at stacks of shoeboxes mid-living room, grocery bag of dishes on kitchen counter, welcome mat in a roll, clothes hanging in wrappers, fold-out futon, not folded out, no sat-on bum prints, the toiletries dry, glass vanity shelves and perfume bottles dusty, a CD player with cord bunched in a twist tie and no CDs, a message board leaning against entrance wall, clean, the storage room air we breathed on bare futon, windows complaining about stiff hinges, she tried every key to get us in, saying she's been away for awhile.

want to walk there, it'd be even worse, and that's why Kottbusser Tor was the best solution, it wasn't far and there were some good Turkish restaurants there. 156 lit. Militia Canal, one of many man-made canals in Berlin 167 a generally poor, lower-income, lower-class district of Berlin south of Kreuzberg 168 unemployment work program 169 social assistance program 170 to be on the dole 171 a high school in Berlin-Neukolln which became known across Germany in March, 2006 when the teachers walked out and asked the city government to close the school down because they could no longer control the student violence there. This started a country-wide debate about the German school system, violence at schools, and the integration of students from immigrant families. And I do not name her, that being all I knew of her, our ten months together. Secrets she denied keeping. Her family and friends, phantom faces I stuck on subway passengers and grocery shoppers, did double takes street side, that person could be related to...?

Shoe boxes to one side, dishes on shelves, my furniture gone for 75 Euros, my bags open in this empty living room for months, my CDs playing, the futon down and bed sheets I had not left in Friedrichshain. Alone, finally living, alone.

Fidicinstrasse, at the mouth of tiny Kopischstrasse where Mike and Orla had three tiny mouths to feed. Step off the U6 at U Platz der Luftbriicke172, site of the Berlin Airlift, ruination of Soviets' Berlin Blockade, June 24, 1948 - May 11, 1949, food from the West! dropped at Tempelhof Airport not 500m from empty apartment, I debark U6 at airport front door, Nazi architecture intimidating and grand, 1000 years! 1000 year-end came in twelve and now the airport is gone, site of West Berlin's deliverance from hold-up to become land for development, more apartment towers and shops! an international airfield's worth.

Throughway Tempelhofer Damm becomes Mehringdamm at same U6 stop, northward gradual descent toward Bergmannstr., second left into Fidicinstr., off the roaring start-stop of commuters the Fidicin is quiet, quaint with strings of tiny flags draped overhead across the street, buildings facing and cooperating to celebrate a holiday unbeknownst to me in early July 2008 (on a walk-through for photos awakening 2006 long buried). The empty apartment, 200m, right side, I made my own until we painted and turned in our keys.

Stop halfway, 100m from Mehringdamm on the left, Imbiss Wasserturm1 Mohammed behind counter 11a.m.-la.m. everyday but Monday, will make you pizza for cheap, toppings loaded, piping; a Berliner Pilsner or Flensburger always cold. He welcomes you, eats his raw onion chunks and white rolls all day, proud of his children he supports, his wife working with him until falling ill. Walk in, the one-man-show, three feet between counter along right side and ledge along the left for eating while standing, looking into full-wall mirror. All ingredients displayed under glass along counter, I ordered differently every night, dropping in after my evening classes let out, glad another week was done, my pizza often involved artichoke hearts. One night, Mohammed pointed at the toppings so I wouldn't speak, and I nodded at him for the right choices because neo-nazis occupied counter and ledge's end, speaking of Hitler, grandfathers, dropping names I'm happy not to know.

lit. subway station Airlift Square lit. Water Tower Imbiss 94

In silence, my face draws no special attention, and I'm told later these skinheads know not to mess with Mohammed. Pizza done, I smiled at this chef and protector, a friend then on.

Down Kopischstr. not 100m long, 90 degree right turn only choice, next street Chamissoplatz left, tiny square park I know as trees so close together, the rest blocked from view; basketball court fenced on all sides to the right, a youth centre bustling in a cage, the city out? or youth locked in? sometimes puppies are packed into pet store, barred display, I felt uncomfortable watching, no way in.

Along west edge of Chamisso, descending to Bergmann after another left, Arndtstr., then right onto Nostitzstr., Nose-Tits-Street but actually named after someone, laugh anyway past die Haifischbar174, mostly cocktails, expensive as Bar Nou approaching one block down on Bergmann. Past Bergmann, halfway to Gneisenaustrasse, Nose-Tits still funnier when across from a Swinger club, PETS 4 KNOTTY sprayed on building side. Pets are animals, except when "heavy" or "intimate" modify, knotty sounds tied up, twisted, but also like misbehaviour's goings-on, naughtiness punishable by petting, but I digress...

Finally Bergmannstrasse, street of cafes, restaurants, used books, one sex shop with leather clad mannequin smiling zipper-mouthed beside street entrance. Bergmann street of cocktails, Mexican food, sushi, China soup bowls, German Feinkost ; funky neon purses, wallets, bags from BagAge; Videotheque , hairdressers, baby strollers, organic stores by membership; a greek restaurant just off on Schenkendorf across from Mike and Orla's new spot on Arndt, if only we had a zip line or pulley system, Mike says and orders from there often; furniture second-hand, music stores, all the screens we watched WorldCup '06,1 wondered about Krossener and Hagen and Claudia but didn't go back, didn't meet, held back memory of EuroCup '04.

Kreuzberg 61 nicht so schlimm, es deprimierte mich schon aber ich wollte nicht so schnell raus, wusste sowieso nicht. Arbeiten blop\ Kumpels, die ihre eigene Leben hatten, Kinder, Frauen. Einfach gesagt, ich war zu faul mein Leben zu andern. Eines Abends in der irischen Kneipe sagte Graham, you'll likely find she's fucking someone else, Mike ziickte zusammen, und ich antwortete, could be, Graham, who knows, mir egal, alles Scheip- egal geworden irgendwann in der Bahn zwischen Friedrichshain und 61 mit zwei schweren Rucksacken und einer misslichen Kiste, irgendwie als ich mich entschieden habe, niemanden um Hilfe zu

lit. the Shark Bar delicatessen video store 95 bitten, und die Wohnung stand so leer, ich konnte mir nichts anderes vorstellen, wollte also dass die Raume meiner so blieben. 7

Feb. 16, 2006 - 25 birthday. No one around, only she knew, did nothing but book me a haircut in fancy salon, my treat and alone, she wanted to call her father (same birthday), but privately from other apartment; our argument stretching over appointment, she 1 "78 1 "7Q said, Du kotzst mich an! and I might have said, Gleichfalls! if I were her type, but I'd rather puke alone, no one listening, she left as I said, Recht vielen Dank!, emphasis on Recht vielen180, door slam, called Canada, best wishes, then left for Mohammed. 25th birthday with my Egyptian confidante, tell him anything, but somehow never that it was my birthday, desire for face-to-face congratulations swelling, itching, chicken pox trained me well not to scratch. Artichoke, ham and tomato, three 0.5L Berliners and two to go, paid from own pocket, under 12 Euros. Thanked him for his sign language when I walked in on skinheads, he said, Keiner braucht in meinem Geschaft Angst zu haben, solche Leute haben keine Ahunung, aber sie wissen, wer die Kontrolle hat, ich hab's im Griff, sie wissen kein ScheiB hier zu machen , his knuckles whitened around pizza knife.

Talked about selling his Imbiss, Das reicht schon, he said, schon 1 R9 zu lange hier gewesen . Always something in the way, buyers back out, equipment too old, shop too small, ich freute mich, 1 R^ wollte nicht dass er geht , but didn't tell him. Imbiss Wasserturm, sign still offers Pasta Pizza Salat184, but interior dark, summer 2008, Mohammed's generic pizza boxes taped up display windows from inside, like a checkerboard in front of which, handcut rectangle of neon orange card, Mohammed's black marker hand has written: ZU VERKAUFEN185

Kreuzberg 61 not so bad, sure it depressed me but I / didn't want out fast, didn't know anyway. Just working, / buddies who had there own lives, kids, wives. / Simply put, I was too lazy to change my life. / One night in the Irish Pub, Graham said, you'll likely find / she's fucking someone else, Mike winced, and I / answered, could be, Graham, who knows, I didn't care, stopped giving a shit / sometime in the train between Friedrichshain / and 61 with two heavy backpacks and an awkward box, / somehow as I decided, not to ask anyone for help, / and the apartment was so empty, I couldn't imagine / anything else, wanted those rooms of mine to remain so. 178 vulgar German expression meaning "You make me sick!" or "You make me wanna puke!" 179 Likewise! 180 Recht vielen Dank! - Many, many thanks! - With emphasis on Recht vielen [Many, many], the expression sounds sarcastic. 181 No one need fear in my shop, / those people have no idea, but they do know who / has control, I do, they know not to stir up any shit here 182 That's enough, he said, already been here too long. 1831 was happy, / didn't want him to go 184 German spelling of "salad" 96

TEL. 0162 3890798 I wanted to call, ask about his artichoke heart, order a Berliner and his drinking companionship though he only drank tea. I think of you in Feb., Mohammed, save a free bit of counter, let me know where you are.

Next day, email from Bettina, woman with bouncy curls and perfect circle eyes, last weekend we spoke at Anna's farewell, 15 minutes, her friends waiting at the exit, her compliments, closeness of breath I'd been missing. Mike, Graham, Willi and I at the Irish pub every Thursday I told her, my birthday even, but Mike couldn't and I couldn't say 25, or be alone, I went for pizza and then this:

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 09:31:15+0100 Hallo, Rebecca und ich waren gestern abend im Irish Pub am Erkelenzdamm um Dir zum Geburtstag zu gratulieren und ganz viel Englisch zu sprechen und wen haben wir angetroffen ? Ungefahr 37 Gruppen von irischen, englischen oder amerikanischen Bingospielern mit Papphuten auf dem Kopf:-) Falls Dich vielleich diese Email erreicht: Alles Gute zum Geburtstag nachtraglich !

Liebe Griipe, Bettina186

...I still haven't written back.

185 FOR SALE 186 Hello,/ Rebecca and I were at the Irish Pub on Erkelenzdamm last night to wish you / Happy Birthday and speaks lots of English, and who / did we meet? / About 37 groups of Irish, English or American / Bingo players with paper hats on their heads :-) / If this Email happens to reach you: Best belated Birthday wishes! / Loving greetings, / Bettina 97

59. Shades of Blue

The bluest blue, my bruised belief that I'll make it back to Berlin. In German "blue" means drunk but my blue eyes are so clear.

The leaves are about to turn and tell me I've been blue for a year, I'll tell them to turn back, keep it down, and wait till the movie is over.

I'm done practicing with German subtitles, here the nudity is all cut. The ticket ripper says this is no blue cinema. Now Canada recycles: the grey box for paper, the blue for glass, the depot for bottles but when cleaning, I save a few trips and throw everything away. My belly's reminder enough, how long I've been cabbing up Fredericton's hill. Like a road squirrel spilling blue entrails, I've laid myself open to sudden endings. From the hilltop the sky is clear, an obvious colour. Somewhere it touches the sea and the shades of blue tell me the continents are never far apart. Berlin, you are an old man hunched over a guitar, such a blue period can only befall a city where museums are riddled with bullet holes. But

I've rejoined my preserved home where the news has not hit and I'm fattened up for the coming kiss of cold, blue winter's lips. 98

60. Lovelite courtyard, EuroCup '08

And there were beer bottles when you walked in, on the ground under the benches behind me, so you saw them before I saw them, and you saw me before I turned - heard footstep crunch and scrape. I turned around and then over and over this later in my head. Walking home on quiet cobblestones, Apotheke on corner of Gryphius Street und Krossener, Apothecary closed now so I swallow you, though you are gone and relief does not come.

Today's tense soccer: Romania 1:1 Italy Holland 4:1 France Day before: Germany 1:2 Croatia Austria 1:1 Poland

You were there, Antje, behind me one bench down, at the back, under the open air, tarpaulin roof under the rain under the clouds. Same clouds above football stadium, kilometres away in neighbouring country of your language, not my own. Come to the music, you said, come to the festival. And I did. But first there was this night of beer bottles scattered, rolling, shattered, and/or empty. It is possible to be empty and not shattered, but to be shattered means emptiness and we had no option but to roll, then scatter as well.

1R7 The football, Kommste heut Abend? , you in my phone. 1 DO Natiirlich I'm coming tonight, of course, my reply, your phone - rings constantly when we're together. Move, Antje, as the spectators under crowding pressure, as players on green field, as our eyes across projection screen, move toward me, away from the day before I arrived, move with me moving around you, before moving in. The bar behind me, I move away from it, keep the drink present in mind, knowing it's you I approach. My goal in front, my back-up behind. However brief, I turn over and over again from full bottles to the empties scattered at your feet.

Comin' tonight? Of course; lit. naturally 99

68. Berlin exists

as location as geography in the stories of others as history, physical and otherwise, without me:

Berlin ist vermutlich uber 800 Jahre alt. Ganz genau weip man das nicht, denn die meisten alten Urkunden sind verbrannt. Aus Grabungen und Bauuntersuchungen kann 1 SQ man jedoch die Friihgeschichte der Stadt gut erschliepen. Dr. Arnt Cobbers. Kleine Berlin-Geschichte. 7. Berlin is a haunted city. By the middle of this century, people living in Berlin could look back on a host of troubles.. .memories can be a potent force... Memories often cleave to the physical settings of events. That is why buildings and places have so many stories to tell. They give form to a city's history and identity. Brian Ladd. The Ghosts of Berlin. 1.

Alles, was sich vor dem 9. November 1989 ereignete, war »damals«; alles, was seitdem passiert, geschieht »heute«. So teilt sich aus Berliner Sicht die Geschichte in zwei Epochen. Damals war die Stadt geteilt und die Mauer weltweit bekanntes Symbol der Spaltung nicht nur Berlins, sondern auch Deutschlands und Europas, heute ist die Stadt vereinigt und wachst zusammen.190 Eckart D. Stratenschulte. Kleine Geschichte Berlins. 7.

Langsam durch belebte StraPen zu gehen, ist ein besonderes Vergmigen. Man wird iiberspult von der Eile der anderen, es ist ein Bad in der Brandung. Aber meine lieben Berliner Mitbiirger machen einem das nicht leicht, wenn man ihnen auch noch so geschickt ausbiegt. Ich bekomme immer miptrauische Blicke ab, wenn ich versuche, zwischen den Geschaftigen zu flanieren. Ich glaube, man halt mich fur einen Taschendieb.191 Franz Hessel. Ein Flaneur in Berlin. 5.

Berlin is probably over 800 years old. It is not exactly known because most old records are burnt. However, one is able to unlock much of the city's early history from excavations and building site explorations. 190 Everything that occurred before November 9, 1989, was "then"; everything that has taken place since then, happens "today". So is history divided into two epochs from the Berliner view. Then the city was divided and the Wall was the known symbol worldwide of the division of not only Berlin, but also of Germany and Europe, today the city is reunited and growing together. 191 To walk slowly through the bustling streets is a special treat. One is submerged in the hurry of others, it is to bathe in the surge. But my beloved, fellow Berlin citizens do not go easy if one so adeptly bends around them. I always receive suspicious looks when I try to stroll between the busy ones. I believe they take me for a pickpocket. 100

The difference is this: in Paris one is cheated, here one cheats; it is sort of comical. Franz Kafka. "Picture Postcard, Berlin."

Kein Kompass, kein Wanderstab, kein Rucksack. Wer in Berlin auf Entdeckungstour gehen mochte, braucht nicht viel. Nur etwas Neugierde, ein paar Stunden Freizeit und den Richtigen Stadtfuhrer.192 die tip Edition. Berlin Touren 2008. Editorial.

"Das ist ein mieser Stadtfuhrer," sagt murrisch mein standiger Trinkgenosse. "Es interessiert doch keinen Menschen, wie du die StraPenbahn nimmst und ins Berliner Aquarium fahrst."193 Vladimir Nabokov. "Stadtfuhrer Berlin." 8.

Five million people visit Berlin every year. Over 100,000 stay on. Why? Berlin is always in motion, constantly changing and never finished - that's the Berlin feeling millions of people visiting the city get every year. It's what fascinates and keeps many of them there. Even Berliners themselves are seized by the Berlin feeling. In the world's finest locations, they are overcome by an indefinable yearning. It's a longing not only for the Kurfiirstendamm but for the city as a whole with all its absurdities, which after the fall of the Wall and reunification flourish as never before. Jochen Stamm. Feeling Berlin. Trans. Paul Aston. 11.

It likes to party, and partying is what it does well, even when the city coffers are close to empty. Especially in the summer of the World Cup. The city has an openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, who also has a high fun quotient and continues to enjoy high popularity. Berlin bleibt Berlin. Berlin remains Berlin. And with a little luck and hard work, perhaps Germany's time of punishment will soon be truly over. Frederick Taylor. The Berlin Wall. 667.

Berlin ist wirklich toll. Schliepiich lebe ich seit funfzehn Jahren hier. Aber manchmal ist es ganz gut, sich fur einige Wochen aus dem Staub zu machen, um zu sehen, ob man die Stadt bei der Ruckkehr immer noch so toll findet.194 Barbara Bollwahn. "Berlin Macht Depressiv."

Ich gehe erst einmal los, dachte er. Der Rest wird sich schon irgendwie ergeben.1 Sven Regener. Herr Lehmann. 285.

No compass, no walking stick, no backpack. Anyone in Berlin who wishes to go on a discovery tour does not need much. Only some curiosity, a couple hours of free time and the right city guide. 193 "That is a rotten city guide," said my regular drink companion peevishly. "It is of no interest to any man how you take the streetcar and travel to the Berlin Aquarium." 194 Berlin really is fantastic. After all I've lived here for fifteen years. But sometimes it is quite good to run away for a few weeks to see if you still find the city so fantastic when you return. 195 For a start I'll leave, he thought. The rest will somehow unfold. 101

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Poetics and Research

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variants)." Lyrical Ballads. Eds. R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones. New York: Barnes &

Noble Inc., 1963. 235-66. CURRICULUM VITAE

Candidate's full name: Carson Richard Butts

Universities attended (with dates and degrees obtained):

University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada 2001-2004 BA with First Class Honours in German and Spanish

Humboldt Universitat, Berlin, Germany 2003-2004 One Year Self-Proposed Program of Study to Complete UNB German BA Requirements

University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta 2000-2001 First Year of University Study

Publications:

Butts, Carson. "Arachnophobia." Qwerty 23 (Winter 2009): 51.

Butts, Carson. "On Foot" and "The Potential." Qwerty 21 (Spring 2007): 85-6.