Sometimes at night I like to talk to myself
in the dark, on the way home, on my bike
and then Berlin you drive me crazy with desire
for you, the trees which flicker over my back
like beetles’ wings, going light and dark, light
and heavy, all three at once
Tag: nighttime
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light at night ja
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Blurlin
Last night was an event called The Long Night of the Design Studios in which studios threw their doors open and invited people to come look. Cheeses were carved on raw plywood platters and I saw a girl in a filmy white dress carving chunks off an entire pig’s leg. The night before, DMY design festival opened in an old hangar at the abandoned airport Tempelhof. Tonight is the opening of the Poesie Festival. Ordinarily I stay home for weeks on end, writing in pajamas in cafes, undisturbed by anything beyond the books and the birds. I’m proposing a name change: Blurlin.
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in kindly whispers
Long night ride home between the trees, the trees, the trees. They are dark and tall and reach down into the night, yearning away wild from the centre of the earth its boiling core. They are reaching the night down for us on earth, in whispers, like kindly adults explaining something magical to children.
My bicycle is silent and has no lights.
You know that high still cloud at night that seems creamy and shattered like when someone, really stoned, showed you how custard powder is the only substance on earth that can be stirred, when mixed up thick enough in a bowl of water, and at the same time shattered at a blow from the back of a spoon. A liquid, a solid. Like glass. That was last century and in a different hemisphere but, yes, Gus, I still remember it.
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everywhere at work
Berlin by night. Candles in the windows of quiet roadside bars. Soundless cyclists ignoring the lights. Puddles from the rain glinting under the trees, on the path alongside the canal. Pizza restaurant which has set out a yard full of benches and long trestle tables since I was here last, which was the end of a bitter, long winter. In the front corner of the yard are two spindly chairs, their feet looped about by overnight chains, standing perkily either side of a carved concrete round-topped table. A big quiet tree separates this lovers’ corner from the rest of the empty restaurant. We sit on the two chairs and watch quietly as the night evolves imperceptibly round us. This couple are walking their dog. A car is passing in a haze of invisible rain drops. This large tree on which I rest my hand is growing, sap rising, leaves unfurling and sprouting from the trunk in several places. Life is everywhere at work and leaves its carcases and traces.
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in the dark
Things you can do in silence, in the dark. Cycling alone under trees, flicker, flicker. Watching petals fall in flakes of tiny silver alight on the black liquid wind. Swinging on a swing someone’s fixed to a low bough overhanging the water, the wind rushing gently and softly as cat’s paws past your ears.
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a nighttime walk
It’s 11pm. Went for a bedtime walk around the road with my friend and host. Most of the houses are dark and in one or two windows are lights. Don’t other people’s houses entice when it is late and one longs for one’s bed.
A tree along the highway has burst into bloom. “I like the apples from that tree,” she says. In the next street three raw apartment blocks rest on torn earth, now rained in. A dark tree yields the faint squeak of some almost-sleeping bird. I tell her how I crouched by the river and watched a pair of ducks, colourful male & dun female, surf past with lolling expressions on their faces (or so it seemed); the current is rapid and swollen with snowmelt after the spring freeze. Five minutes later they passed again: looked like the same couple, still skating pleasurably. I thought they must have flown up to have another go. Yes, she says: they do that. I would too, I think, if I were feathered.
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fado menu
Well, I’m never leaving here. Restaurant down some tiny steps with a hand-lettered menu in the window and a tiny castle built out of corks. On ordering sardines what you get is a plate piled with whole grilled fish and a small mound of potatoes, boiled then tossed in butter. Everything perfectly simple. We ordered half the dessert menu and dipped our spoons contentedly. A very drunk man wearing double denim (I explained to my companion this could also be a verb: you’re not *double deniming*, are ya?) made his way up and down the stairs repeatedly, with determined attention and heavy breathing with effort. The owner stood in the narrow doorway smoke from his cigarette filling the room; his luscious daughter and her mother, a jowlier, fuller version, ran between the tables. In fact after poring over the Portuguese menu for a while I asked the daughter had they a menu in English. She summoned her father. He unfolded his glasses and peered into a few blue vinyl folders before triumphantly producing a version neatly typed in French. By comparing the two versions we could triangulate. Near midnight a man came in with his guitar and tuned up at the counter. His songs were written on laminated cards, he considered them for over half an hour. Then he turned to the long table of local people – there were only 14 of us in the restaurant – and began to play, inviting the room to the chorus. A bosomy lady in ferocious print danced, shimmying her hips expertly and directly in front of the face of the younger man, maybe 50, who had come in with his friend and who she evidently thought was a bit of alright. The singer sang on and she danced solemnly, proudly, stomping a little on the turns. Flushed and excited she raced up to the singer and whispered in his ear. “Another time,” he said in Portuguese: something like “Un autre mal.” I was mortified for her. She crossed between the head of the table and the serving counter with some difficulty and sat down, her bosom heaving. But within minutes she too was singing along with the rest of us, lustily but not loudly. When we left, the prize male and his elderly neighbour looked over their shoulders to say with careful enunciation, “Heff… a good… evening.” “Obrigada,” I said, “you too!” The beautiful one said, “Alfama! Ees beautiful!” Oh yes, I said, my hand on my breathing: beautiful. “And the people…” “Wonderful!” Steep, cobbled, gristly with careening streetcars: yes, wonderful.
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cradle of many things
Cycling home under a high full moon through a dark city so cold it’s as though the streets stand motionless under water. Northern Europe, cradle of so many things, including me. The buildings stand serene on street corners, unafraid of waiting. Traffic sporadic, roads wide and smooth, trees utterly leafless with branches standing separate and bare against the sky but, if I were to reach up and drag one down, already the infestation of buds and bugs that’s Spring.
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finally, in Europe
I’m in Copenhagen. It’s so beautiful. Went out walking in the albert-full moon and feel I am finally in Europe. Everything built is fine & old, and all of the landscape is sculpted. The soil is dark and seems fine & light, beautiful Country in a solemn, calm, minimalist sense, more dry South Australia than lush Queensland.
How I got here was, hopped on the wrong train on platform 14 at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof and was carried several miles into the region of Whereonearth as I slowly realized my mistake. Went pale and sweaty with panic, leapt off at Whereonearth and scampered back to Berlin in a cab. The blessed Deutsche Bahn which runs on time like oil on water was blessedly late; forty minutes late! hooray, got on the right train. Travelled all day through increasingly Protestant countryside with this dark soil like crumbled bread and then, so exciting, the whole entire train drove very slowly onto a huge ferry and we all got off and rode in silence across a featureless expanse of water, greeted by waving wind towers on the Nordic shore, sky white and hanging low, out into the fresh cold misty Danish countryside. The coins are so heavy and beautiful when I was given change I had to hold them in my hand and turn them for long moments. I found a restaurant with a wall of old glassed bookshelves where they flame crepes at the table. I found a park where the sweet gates came up to my knees. I found the harbour. The haven. København.