Epektasis

We crossed at the hour when light
lays down its small instruments
and customs windows glow blue,
the air stiff with cold.
Minus nine—
even breath genuflecting.

The line of bodies loosened itself
like a rosary of tired documents,
each bead slid hand to hand,
our names thinned to numbers,
then thickened again with ink and stamp.

In our mouths, Scotland;
in our pockets, the old map of Europe;
between us and passage—glass,
a uniform’s calibrated stare,
the practiced patience of waiting.

My grandfather kept pace with me,
his consonants thick as winter coats,
his right hand bearing the gospel of loss—
the middle finger gone,
a psalm cut short by refusal.

The sun folded its vestments.

Strike weather.

A taxi hauled the dark toward Petersburger Straße,
the meter ticking heat into silence,
city breathing through frost.
Trams stalled mid-sentence,
buses erased from their verbs.

We left early, trusted the overground,
and the city gave us Landsberger Allee:
fifteen minutes of ice,
the arithmetic of footfall,
each step rehearsing collapse.

Still—arrival.
Three bodies, one small room.
Steam wrote halos on the windows.
Weariness draped us
like damp wool after rain.

No beer-hall trumpets—
only television’s pale vigil
and supermarket cans.
Even this is mercy:
the small poverty of beginnings.

Morning.
Cold hoards the keys,
but the forecast leans toward light.
I become a guide—
that mild pest who pins ruins to sleeves,
saying: look, remember, breathe.

We walk the broken spine of the Wall,
touch concrete freckled with names,
stand under glass where voices rise
and fracture upward,
pause among slabs that refuse symmetry,
a choir that will not resolve.

Near the scar where a bunker once nested—
now oil slicks, parked cars—
I keep a small rite:
one spit, metallic with cold,
hissing on pavement
for the engineers of erasure,
for the draftsmen of ash.

One spit for my grandfather,
for the finger lost in saying no,
for the hand that learned absence
before I learned his name.

Last night Petersburger Platz murmured.
Ghosts gathered—
sled-hauling children,
women counting bread,
men weighing coins into cold palms—
not to be marble,
only to pass through,
to keep the street open
for strikes and late trains,
for arrivals weary
but unfinished.

Berlin wears iron blues and soot whites.
Windows return a narrow sun.
Under frost the city breathes—
radiators knocking awake,
bakeries loosening yeast,
coffee warming the hands of strangers.

So we step into this unfinished light,
carrying names heavier than luggage,
walking without clean resolution,
learning again how to stand
while the ground keeps shifting—
and calling this, quietly,
a form of praise.