Practical Water

Tiergarten Scenes

T I E R G A R T E N S C E N E S Berlin 2002 H E R C U L E S B R I D G E Perhaps it’s average to want not to have failed an experience. I have sensed this in cities just as between rungs of a bridge there are sunbeam sway curls, as if between emotions there were livelier half-states where it could be Wednesday afternoon & something would sail: a humming syllable enters a coil, a whorl of blue pollen over a lake, a companionable loneliness, the hair of the maenads who could destroy you. I was interested in the place where pain & pleasure were made worse & better by life among others. “ D E C I S I V E B E N C H E S ” ( WA LT E R B E N J A M I N ) Linked in swirling sun with sugar ovals from their breasts, in outskirts of a city park, your mourning 1 8 for syntax finds momentary rest where the Other throbbed— N E W L A K E Minnows mix artless but best domains with minuet fear here where the park is without angles, the swans are mean, & hug the lake. We join the style of Sunday strolling as if 1932 were quiet in warm shade; people pass with special sighs & the sense we fall into (the half-feeling as if by obsession with historical distance, as if the terrible could be pre-avoided—) is that to perceive, beyond perception frees the pattern— minnows with plusses or fire signs on their tails— L I C H T E N S T E I N B R I D G E At the country resistance canal, near where Rosa was thrown in, lovers lean over . . . their sexual intensity, their point of view— der Gesichtspunct— ; 1 9 every moment so intimate, the water cannot relate. You read history on the bench. Just beyond your book: letters float upstream. Unable to prevent a “next” by reading, stalled in a sequence— as if in terror or mysticism—you call on the meaningful & numbered past. 2 0 ...