Brandenburg

Years ago and I don’t remember when. Bodies ground air in the breath ash of the lived asking what is this what animates the dust? A wade into season the chestnut trees bare, then aflame, again and again and you as if unmoving, as if locked in shades of green and pine, though close to sea, busy somehow watering days night and morning with your tears night and morning in that long plane monotony still but for birds, flies, here and there the muddy lake. In town little belief and fewer rooms to focus but I saw what was left of painting, and there were bars and those aplenty. Thick fingers thick wrists savvy in the rough ways hewn close to buried pain. Willed bondage. Silence caught cement. A wide blue stretched taut turning bright turning long on the other side of winter’s unending pall and I wish I could say how it was. Every corner collapse into self. Every loss of future tense. The nervous busy now east, now west, the rail-sutured city, red though mostly grey. No alternative, that was the name of the game. So keep your ears up, they’d say, eyes open, ignore the rumbling the shaking there just below your feet.

Brandenburg

Slivovitzed sky a weeping eye in evening’s dark lull, torn
coat. The tone was February. Raw-boned, sanded
down by smoke. Distant drones. Time’s grain.
The dead still quiet of a provincial feast
day what do seasons matter.
Blind in sight. Turbulence.
The damned desire of having. Of hoarding.
Desire.
Desire.

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Alexander Booth is a poet and translator who lives in Berlin. Recent translations include books by Friederike Mayröcker, Alexander Kluge, Gerhard Rühm, and a new translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. His collection of poems Triptych was published in 2021 and Kantor in 2023.