List of Things I’d Like to Say to Ivy

1.      You seem to be everywhere I look, Ivy. The closer to the edge of Berlin I come, the more of you there is, Ivy. On the cherry tree in the deep east of Brandenburg, in the small garden with the old barn we bought. Growing on endless Soviet and World War I memorials. And on the churchyards of course. And all over the old mill that I passed in the wolf woods; a massive structure of ivy stretching up and out of the valley, blooming in December, only the mill’s steadily rotating wheel visible.

2.      The above made me wish I were more like you, Ivy. Because you’re not like the prickly, stout juniper shrubbery smelling of spicy fox piss that surrounds the Seelower memorial honoring the “liberation” of Germany by the Soviet army. And you’re not like the pretty grapevine that has surrendered to the autumn too soon, too apathetic, painting a red trail along Berlin train tracks all the way to Wannsee and back.

3.      You’re more like getting off that train, Ivy, and following google maps — climbing up, down, left, right — to find an audio guide to the acoustic memorial of Heinrich von Kleist and instead finding myself in a camp of homeless people under the bridge between Großer and Kleiner Wannsee. Green sleeping bags tugged in between the top of the grey pillars and the road’s flipside, like truthful garlands.

4.      And at the actual memorial (a tombstone surely installed by Herr von Kleist’s ghost himself, mostly grieving for the living) you’re a crisp, leafy poison in the air above the Havel river. And the river, the color of baby Yoda’s eyes, laps against the banks heavy with cold while an elderly behatted lady trims your growth around the stone, and a strange streamable voice in my ears only shouts:

Wo geh ich her? Wo geh ich hin?
Und wenn du das nicht weißt, wohlan:
Wo bin ich? sag mir an, das wirst du wissen;
In welcher Gegend hier befind ich mich?“

And the Alraun, the witch — or is it you, Ivy? — answers:

Zwei Schritt vom Grab, Quintilius Varus,
Hart zwischen Nichts und Nichts! Gehab dich wohl!

At least I’m between the nothings, I thought. But to be certain I took my family and left the city, while we could, to feel closer to living things growing out of the dirt.  

5.      And oh Ivy, the sky-scraping cherry tree is covered in you, in the garden we bought. A sight for sore city eyes, wild enough to fall in love with. But now that I am the caretaker of the tree, I am unsure that it will survive you. Is it true or is it just a myth: that you kill? I do want to do the right thing, but I’m in a Funkloch and have not yet installed Wi-Fi, so there’s no way of knowing; I tear you off the tree. Hack and hack your roots. With a spade, it’s fun while listening to Taylor Swift, setting free the blond scars of the tree’s skin. It’s a way to deal with love, if I understood the song correctly: a kind of ivy?

6.      I hacked on, not successful in killing your roots, while the kids pulled down the grapevine from the old stone walls in one morning: The morning of the freedom of the stones, I thought. But the stones looked old and like something was missing. The vine was easy to get rid of, but Ivy, you were like: Thick jelly, poison stalactites from a hairy misplaced root, like the legs of a mythologized spider, hanging from a tree. But protruding from the ground, little green leaves nourished by the hidden mother of roots. Not like the start of nothing. More like a trinity of growth, death, love: destruction at its best. Like you, Ivy. It made me want to be more like you.

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