Berlin, April 2003

Literary Review, Spring, 2004 by Kristian Bang Foss

Berlin, April 2003

A drainpipe is a vertical white line, there where the sunlight
hits it.

A newspaper is lifted from a field of direct sunlight. Smell of warm
printer's ink.

Daily list with German words. The piping of the water heater.

Passing trolley rocks the jumble of cables above the street.

The wail of the switchyard at night/nightly moan of trains being
reshunted.

A dog barks at a whistling man in the yard.

Clouded over: I discovered on Kastanien allee a bicycle shop that had
been invisible in the sunlight.

A woman who cycles on the left side of the road with an orange bag on
each side of the handlebars.

Grooves in the wall like those that worms can gnaw under bark.

A man strides smiling over a puddle with butter in his outstretched
left hand.

A woman with a yellow bag photographs the facade behind which I sit.

The bald man in a strained run; black-clad; flying scarf and fashionable
glasses.

Man with black Borsalino pulls delighted child on red tractor.

Shabby man with crumpled Aldi bag returns to my field of vision, passes
two-thirds through it and lets himself into number 26.

The sound of the waitress who with a serrated knife saws a hard-crusted
bread.

Hand with cigarette protrudes by itself from an open window.

Suddenly hail and escape under a canopy; the drumming of hail on the
canopy; girl who forms a bowl of her hand.

Bullet holes in a nougat-like wall.

Milk with strawberry taste drunk on a bench.

Green-clad watchman with automatic pistol and moustache looks like
someone who eats soft-boiled eggs.

Man behind the shutter cocksure; pigeon puffs itself up, fans out its
tail and drags it through the dust.

Comforting words from Troels about the inflection of adjectives; a
little cloud of dregs in a white beer.

The night chill lingering in the stairway; a swastika painted in the
entry.

Among lilies in a cemetery: Beetles with red and black patterns on
their shell. First discovering one, then several--just like the
discovery of Chanterelle mushrooms.

A candy-striped canopy--and underneath, the stacked slanted cases of
round fruit in clear colors. A girl with black page-boy hair runs past;
holds ice cream in the tip of a cone, held out as though she aims over
it toward a trolley she has to catch?

Pain in my legs after nightly bicycle ride on a borrowed bike/meeting
with fox during the nightly bicycle tour.

Waitress fumbles with espresso machine so I only get half a cup--it
doesn't matter; coffee's not good for you.

A trolley-car partially conceals another trolley-car. Then they
simultaneously start moving in opposite directions, like yellow curtains
being drawn open.

Assort the scenery by dividing it in color groups. A passing woman with
red hair incorporates herself in the red group together with, among
other things, cleft watermelon.

Can get my finger into the hank of the cup.

Tonight got the bicycle reflectors in the yard to blink when I opened my
window at the right angle.

Windy; the air is full of whirling dirt; a plastic bag is stuck in a
tree, the wind inflates it so it jerks in the branch like a trout on a
hook; a ripped away poster is held floating.

Blows out his cheeks and put the flats of his hands together in front of
him as though he has caught something in the hollow between them.

The waitress's reflection in the window is incorporated into the street
picture outside; she holds a cup out to a charcoal-gray tree; the tree
like a fractal.

An impression of having in some indefinable manner disgraced oneself, in
addition to exaggerated politeness and perpetual "seeing oneself from
without" while moving about in public.

Orange accessories with the coffee: two oblong envelopes of sugar,
little container of milk and a biscuit packed like a condom. Accessories
for the coffee: Sugar envelopes that are fussed with until the paper
tears/envelope of sugar that crackles when it is rolled between your
fingers.

Metal beam that juts out of the wall as preparation for a sunny balcony;
the elevated track on Schonhauser allee of green-painted metal.

Restless waiter over-focused on when the cup can be removed.

Streetlights of green-painted metal describe parabolic segment.

Quarter in Friedrichshain at night--like an enormous gray maze: The
perfect labyrinth consists of as many uniform modules as possible.