An old green pick-up is towing Stalin around the old city. Excited locals are laughing as they gingerly kick him in the head on the way. Despite the enormous moustache casting a fat shadow on his chin, the modelling is so wooden I have to ask to be sure. Someone in the back squeezes bursts of Super 8 catching him bouncing behind, dangerously, comically, like a puppet out of control. Hunger strikers are asleep in Wenceslas Square, a man eats a lemon, the young couple shout at passers-by ‘If you don't vote, you vote for communism’. The woman at Tourist Information laughs at me, she’s had no enquiries for the Lenin Museum in such a long time. She thinks it’s closed. An evangelical north-American wants to know if the tiny house in Golden Lane was Kafka’s place of birth or death. Her repertoire fails again. She apologises for being born into a utopia ridiculously Kafkaesque, one that assassinated such information until a few months ago. On tourist duty, I visit the puppet theatre, jazz clubs and a Jewish graveyard - stones gnaw silence at all angles from horizontal death to everlasting life. The city lacked neon, tourists or a vibrant night life, but vibrated with hope, an election! The poet Václav Havel became president. The Communists did better than expected.

Dark deep-set eyes are moored beneath a worn felt hat, generous blue veins drain dainty polar hands proffering the catalogue. Her skin is crumpled paper, hurriedly retrieved and smoothed. ‘Nicht crowns’. She opens a well-thumbed address book at the letter S. The notes are all in German. Her other hand rises stone by stone, trembling with the effort, points to the stained glass and massive central light fitting ringed by globes, ‘original’ (with a hard g) and the dome stenciled with script, ‘original’. About to ask a question, I see the last page inked one - nine - three - nine, realisation steps on me, sadness oozes out from the ground of my body - how stupid. I’m knocking on the back door of history. Light flows down white-washed walls opening the space as a gallery, a series of paintings deconstruct landscapes with trees cut down and drawn out into boxes holding the pencils and brushes of their execution. Black and white photographs preserve light, it delicately perspires shadows staining the corners of attics and growth of orchards. The red flag's faded, the almanac stripped of possibilities. What can be felt and smelt are limb-thin, wooden totems and potted palms placed between women on a marble floor. Discarded rubble of the past is bricolage put to use. Originality is impossible to prevent. As I scrawl notes she glances over wondering what I'm doing. I leave her saying the only phrase I could share, děkuji vám (with a soft d), using my tongue then throat and finally my lips to thank her for everything.

Crowds choke the counter, the first is a success, reputed to have one of the biggest turnovers of any in the world. Eight brightly painted high-chairs stand in a row by the door. The converted rail pavilion stretches a huge arched ceiling making this the most luxurious MacDonalds in the world. Around the corner the streets are gloomed, suffocated by the high stone buildings, a legacy from the Lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown of St. Stephen. I am searching for an address to pay the rent. Woman are whistling up clients, one couple are up against the wall, fucking somewhere beneath their coats. A glance draws her face lunar-white, expressionless. Mathias, the Raven King, fought east and west, I know little, this empire was the cutting edge between Christian and Muslim, hoping to join the Europeans soon, elections are underway. The second round is based on the German system of proportional representation. Everything has gone up. 4.45 birds wake me up then go back to sleep. I have cast my vote but nobody has noticed. It is a small vote, easy to miss in the traffic and buttercups massing on the verges.

Looking for somewhere to stay, I reach a recommendation, a small boy answers the door, my sign language fails, sisters and brothers, even smaller, sit in the lounge. The smell of urine is toxic. Hard, and for how long? I jot down a message and leave it on the table, the dogs are howling like wolves. I find a homestay, fall for the beautiful mother and daughter (we exchanged letters for a while). I borrow a field guide to trees and an English-Hungarian dictionary. All the trees are pictured growing by a road and I need Hungarian to English. I pick some leaves, memorise the colour and texture of the bark and sound of wolves in the Mátra Mountains. Trees are flooding every conceivable angle of terrain. Weathered women in ample shapeless jerseys and dresses, cover their heads, grim faces are ploughed with wrinkles. This covered market was only erected last year and tables made available, tables display small piles of carrots, small piles of turnips, small piles of carrots and turnips, earth is tenacious, clings to the roots transactions eventuate via the weight of the soil in the cracks of their large, hardened palms. The bishop's castle, fortified after a Tatar invasion held out against the Turks two hundred years later becoming a symbol of Hungarian resilience. ‘Abacination’ from Medieval Latin, has only one citation, from an obscure source, which is good news. It means blinding by holding a red-hot metal plate before the eyes. ‘Capital punishment, torture, humiliation’ is the current exhibition in the dungeon. It is the most popular museum in Hungary. Craftsmanship and imagination are exhibited. I’m deaf, can only see new directions in metallurgy and the stocks, now a photo-opportunity.

Who can forgets Krakow’s hours, the bugle call, the plaintive phrasing cut, felled as if in battle, an irritant to be scratched, or Ivesian delight. I am a tourist, take advantage of my currency, eat wild boar in an ancient restaurant, drink best beer, buy my mother an amber broach in the market. South of the old town near the castle walls I look down on black and white seminarians snaking Indian file to the Cathedral, soles barely touching the pavement, smart young men old enough for sexual fever and violent death to unzip their skin wall, succumbing inside-out eviscerated, slime evaporating to ordained dust. At a similar age, half of those surveyed in Britain claim ignorance of Auschwitz. I refused to go: because I’m a poet and would have used the occasion to write a poem unable to name all those slain by celebrity killers names like Bianor and Oileus, Iphition Hippothous, Xanthus and Thoon. Sometimes it’s more difficult not to write and refuse to engineer clay or mix inks to your purpose though poets have an obligation to inform and confess.

I left a poetry reading none the wiser, missed Bowie. Less than a thousand Jews remain in the city, one minds the cemetery but is slowly losing the war. The trees insist on growth, tight phalanxes string aloft green pennants, spinning factories of energy, home to Blackbirds singing my lost aria. Spring is elastic, shade emerges off the trees, certain flowers are blossoming, mainly weeds. Empires of moss and lichen conquer the text and blur the images of fruit, doves, books, icons characterising a fruitful life. What the dead do with all their spare time is a mystery.

On a bench in the Tiergarten, a young guy watches birds through the mesh and railings. He doesn’t know the name of the blue helmeted goose. We watch fiery red flamingos on a diet of carrot juice and plump pink spoonbills. A stork flies the scene haphazardly. The flamingos scrap, steal sticks from a spoonbill’s nest. It’s odd, noisy, compacted. A couple try to mate, undignified, unbalanced to our way of thinking. He is studying business engineering. ‘Never heard of it’, I say, ‘but economics fingers everything these days.’ I hardly recognise the emu, imagining some connection. A zebra, out on a limb, stands on silence. The word ‘wild’ derives from the German wald for wood, from a time when Europe was the wildwood, mythic root of German racial purity, blood type A. Gardens are an archaeology of touching forms of life, the meanings we give them and how we use them. City parks were parishes of peace from noise and speed. Walking by the Landwehrkanal, I pass the spot where Rosa Luxembourg was dumped, product of another failed winter revolution. I don’t recall any acknowledgement, just a grass tide lapping the few trees. There were probably pigeons watching. Without map or memory, I’m turned around by a girl on a bicycle, back towards the Brandenburg Gate, ‘a sea of fire’ for Adolf’s first victory in 33. Walter Benjamin ‘envisaged an ordinary map . . . "[that] would make a colourful show if I clearly marked the houses of my friends and girl friends . . . the hotel and brothel rooms that I knew for one night, the decisive benches in the Tiergarten, the ways to different schools and graves that I saw filled . . ." The Room of Silence is silent because it is empty, there is no statue, no plaque, just an abstract wall hanging, fiercely lit by a helium light. The woman at the door is a lovely guardian, a Catholic, but all denominations are welcome. Silence is such a responsibility. The Reichstag is off limits, cranes spike the skyline, building work hammers the whole ground, what kind of Berlin will we be getting? An army in helmets, wielding Geordie and Brummy accents are digging foundations for another beating ventricle of capitalism, here in the middle of everywhere. In the middle of the night, a twenty-eight year old East German officer with a brush and tin of paint carefully bisected Friedrichstrasse with a white line. Checkpoint Charlie has few relics- I’m surprised the sign, ‘You are now entering the American Sector’ hasn’t been souvenired, or maybe it’s a fake? A guard post remains, dwarfed by five buildings shooting up, using the best international architects. Hoarding details extravagant promises of culture. There are three memorials to the wall. One, a museum with a field of more than 1,000 black crosses for victims of the border, is built illegally on land a bank owns, Even today there’s no memorial in Germany to remember those who refused war, brave heroes who would not fight and were executed as cowards or traitors. I find a piece of the wall and a replica guardhouse built on its original site. Corpulent vibrations from the heavy machinery are a reminder that we are made of dust waiting for the demolition of rock, paper, skin. I am naked. It’s humid, rain jumps thunder and lightning, Sturm und Drang, In the middle of the night, the jackhammers stop. I fall asleep. I wake up.

The museum on Spree grips the Pergamon altar, that remarkable frieze sliced in deep relief, the gods fight animal-men giants masked in pain. It was a violent conflict between culture and nature. Zeus defeated the children of Gaia, his spoils embraced patriarchy, technology and war. Students chatter on the stairs. During the war it lived in an air raid shelter near the zoo. The Russians snatched it as booty then returned it to East Germany. I remember the terraced hillsides and scrubby flanks sprayed with grey-green olive trees, drawing on neural networks that sew landscapes from overlapping decals – Mycenae morphs to Troy, Ephesus and reconstructs Delphi. The steep slope has cast an amphitheatre, buzzards circled the Acropolis eyeing a blue rock thrush and goldfinch or two, grasshoppers clattered through the dry grasses. The richest, most beautiful, most cultured Greek city acquired a library to rival Alexandria’s and the services of Dr. Galen who tended to the gladiators. Back in 75, in the Temple of Zeus, our young guide earnestly appealed: ‘the treasures belong HERE beneath THIS SKY’ - I’ve not forgotten his euphoric blue. The ‘treasures’ were gifted by the Macedonian general, Lysimachus, ruler of Thrace and companion to Alexander, megalomaniac looter of Turkey, Egypt, Afghanistan, Persia, India and who destroyed golden Thebes, every structure except for temples and Pindar’s house, so crazy, his name still scares naughty children in central Asia. I discover that Carl Humann was anxious to excavate the site because locals were quarrying the stone for building materials and burning the marble for lime.