Berlin in Spring
Berlin in Spring, and the roar of underground trains, lilac buildings under radiant purple clouds, Italian madrigals spilling through half-open windows, avenues of lime trees, advertisements in neon, shisha bars, the Fernsehturm, graffiti of dragons.
Light fails and the rain falls.
The city slashed away by glares diamonds cathedral spires half-veiled outcries, the quivering semblances of the people. They pass through me in a heave of mists, dark sultry shapes floating on rhythms of whispering white echoes. They pass through me like blackbirds in a mulberry forest at dusk, carrying with them whistling air brakes and the throne of Saturn, a nausea of soaked flowers.
Walking along in the silvery-blue drizzle, from streetlight to streetlight and palace to Platz, slender pitches of fog lifting along the vanishing alleyways, a quartz clock glowing in a window drinking up shadow. Kafka’s immaculate laughter groping through hallways of Portuguese marble.
And the people pass through me.
Glancing spirits like the last refrains of some dissolving orchestra, their eyes lips adrenal glands kidneys trachea bones eaten by imaginary water-maggots and gone up into syllables of diaphanous cloud.
Walking in a blur of whirling color, past second-hand shops and the Seer from Erbil, a gambling parlor with shuttered windows and the front door open, odor of honey baklava from a Turkish bakery, old men in a dim lit Kneipe telling cock-and-bull stories, doom palpitating, erotic gardens dimly glowing and now the hour comes down.
Merlin tunes his instruments.
Enchanted skewers of bloody light glitter off the hood of a Ford Capri Turbo. Egyptian cobras and golden zucchini singing in the Chamber of Amazia.
And the people they pass through me.
