Clinically Haunted

I came to associate Berlin with a particular shade of pink: fuchsia sunsets, the ripple of cherry through white ice cream. Spring in the city was coloured with flirtation, like bubble gum or confetti. Clouds of blossoms covered the trees.

In September summertime ends, floats away on little puffs of milkweed, and the mindless geese will fly over the trees so crowded with leaves that we cannot see the geese but only hear them in their chaos of communication; they come and go, come and go, dragging their invisible net over the land, gathering the last scraps of summer, scattering the first olive-green leaves among the returning finches until you cannot tell finch from leaf, leaf from finch.

"This gorgeous green, / this searing lilac, / this heart that is nothing but mystery.”