https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/06/poem-of-the-week-beer-for-two-in-bockler-park-berlin-by-lucy-burnett

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Show captionCarol Rumens's poem of the week

Poem of the week: Beer for two in Böckler Park, Berlin by Lucy Burnett

A gently subversive love poem that makes language laugh as it falls over itself

Carol Rumens

Mon 6 Sep 2021 07.00 EDT

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Beer for two in Böckler Park, Berlin

You asked me for a love poem
and I gave you a text message and a handful of
imaginary paprika crisps. You told me this was
insufficient to the moment and I agreed.
It was 3.08pm. I wrapped a single curl around
my index finger – smiled. The thing about love
is the very thinginess of it. You must agree!
A ‘now I’ve got you now I never won’t’.

I hold the umbrella to your sunshine
the way you hold it to my rain: tell me one thing
that I don’t know about you? We drink the beer,
confusing the order in which our books would’ve
liked the afternoon to turn around. If I were you and
you were me – I wondered – might me marry you?

Böckler Park, the setting of this week’s poem, is named after the trade unionist and politician Hans Böckler, and located in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, well-known for its arts and countercultural scene. While by its shape on the page, Beer for Two … declares a relationship with traditional sonnet, readers can expect plenty of quietly mischievous subversion of that tradition.

The opening lines confirm that angle: “You asked me for a love poem / and I gave you …” The surprise gift is summed up in a neatly timed zeugma: “I gave you a text message and a handful of / imaginary paprika crisps”. The response is understandably dry: “You told me this was / insufficient to the moment”. The speaker’s casual consent to this judgment is another unexpected small “turn” in the dialogue. If this were a game of chess, “I agreed” would perhaps equal “check”.

Like a mysterious signpost of narrative significance, the presumably exact time is recalled in line five. The poem goes on to illustrate a further lighthearted intensification. The softness of the curl now wrapped around the speaker’s finger contrasts with the pepperiness of the wit (and the crisps). But whose curl is it – the speaker’s or the partner’s? Cannily, the poem doesn’t say. The “thinginess” of love is the next appealing idea, but physicality isn’t all, as the developing wordplay shows. The thing about love may also be a riddle, a commitment primed with explosive double negatives: a “now I’ve got you now I never won’t”. There’s a shared joke, I think, rather than any coercion, in the exclamation, “You must agree!”

The sestet seems to warm and expand like the happy afternoon. Generalisation and real time combine. The way the lovers are different and alike, complementing each other through the differences that are also part of their alikeness, is beautifully expressed in the metaphor of umbrella-sheltering. These images, and the amiable challenge, “tell me one thing / that I don’t know about you?” lead to another brain-teaser for the reader. Using the plural pronoun, the speaker seems to consider the artistic possibilities of the real-life narrative from a book’s-eye point of view, the author being found happily guilty of “Confusing the order in which our books would’ve / liked the afternoon to turn around”. And still, in the poem, there’s a sense that the afternoon has been pleasurably and frequently “turned around”.

As in the octet, surprises that might produce disappointment shake no one’s equanimity. The pronoun-play in the last line and a bit suggests that both humour and tact are part of the reciprocity between speaker and addressee. The final question, whether “wondered” aloud or left unsaid, avoids closure, and yet is delightfully conclusive: “If I were you and / you were me – I wondered – might me marry you?”

A love poem that’s a gently acerbic interrogation of the genre, Beer for two in Böckler Park, Berlin sometimes echoes the Elizabethan sonnet in its verbal antics, but goes much further: it plays with the wordplay and makes language laugh as it falls over itself. Among the other forms of gender stereotyping in the poem’s sights, that of a well-known early 20th-century “love song”, celebrating Tea for Two rather than beer, might be included.

Originally from Dumfries, Scotland, now living in Cumbria, England, Burnett combines accomplishments in many fields of activity: fellrunner and walker, mountain leader for Pride Sports, photographer, performance artist, and more. She was appointed earlier this year as director of the StAnza international poetry festival Her most recent poetry collection, and the source of this week’s poem, is Tripping on Clouds.