Grunewald

along cobbled Berlin streets the trees all have numbers nailed to them on little wooden placards and the doors too, I follow them along quiet sidewalks edged with November snow peppered with soot and wet cigarettes // after a long flight and endless nights fighting the six-hour time difference there is a revelation: peace in the cemetery nearby, benches and tall hedgerows quiet, trees twisted like Van Gogh paintings towering into the gray morning sky domed over ancient Berlin and ghosts beside me, wavering over cobble, along the headstones, the cold November bench of marble // years later I sometimes think I’ll wake and find myself there, across the many lifetimes and ocean swells, the deep cold Atlantic, the farms dotting Lorraine-Alsace, all the way to those headstones in a row, ghosts and vines crawling, searching, dying, reborn // I live winter, I dream spring, I ache summer, I rise come autumn and at night I walk the hedgerows eternal staring into falling white snow frosting the edges of brown yellow leaves, waiting for the pages to run out and all the clocks in the world to pause and point to the penultimate end all be all we all dream about but only meet once in a lifetime, and then \\\ 

JAMES H DUNCAN

James H Duncan is the editor of Hobo Camp Review and author of Both Ways Home, Vacancy, and We Are All Terminal but This Exit Is Mine, among other books. He currently resides in upstate New York and reviews indie bookstores for the Bookshop Hunter blog. For more, visit jameshduncan.com.