One of my favorite poems of the German language is Bertolt Brecht’s “Erinnerung an die Marie A.” The themes of youthful love, impermanence, and fading memory stuck with me the first time I read it, and the poem continues to give me a wistful feeling each time I reread.
Perhaps someday I’ll attempt to give it a formal translation, but for now, here is the German text with a more literal translation.
There is also this musical setting of the German AND a musical setting with English lyrics by David Bowie!
I loved this poem so much that I actually wrote a piece of flash fiction inspired by it (in other words — I wrote fan fiction for poetry!). The result, “Marie A.,” is below. Enjoy.
Marie A.
Above our kiss loomed a monstrous white cloud. It hovered high and vanished, gone with the touch of Marie’s lips. And afterward I said, “How late is it, now?”
But for the cloud, I would have forgotten…
*
He loved her from the morning he saw her in the post office, dropping off a package. The way she smiled, and lowered her eyes, and tapped on the counter with her glitter-painted nails, and laughed at herself when she misheard the question.
He watched from behind thick lenses, behind the yellow stripe of duct tape that must not be crossed. That day he was red-nosed and coughing, snuffling. That day he was thinking of poems and clever lines of dialogue between the antihero and his girl. He was muttering under his breath nonsensical combinations of words that said little, but sounded like song.
Then he saw her, and all silenced.
When she turned, she startled—he’d forgotten not to stare. But then she softened. Slowly. And smiled.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m Marie.” Awkward silence, and she left him, laughing.
*
She was a tease every morning, every morning now with a different post-it on her package which she peeled off and stuck to his lapel as he stood in line. Each post-it bore another tease, another strange doodle, another nonsensical question. You’re my muse, he thought, when he read them. He would work them into his stories and poems no matter how absurd they seemed, no matter how they stretched his capacity to string ideas. These he would present to her, every day she gave him a post-it.
She took them folded between her fingers but never acknowledged that she read them at all.
Then one day she gave him no post-it. She walked right past him, through the glass doors into the street. Never once looked at him. In his pocket he held a love poem, neatly folded.
By the time he dropped off his mail, that poem was a crumpled ball. He spoke no more than a word or two and shouldered out with his head bowed low.
Outside he was stepping onto the sidewalk when he felt a hand grasp his sleeve. When he turned, braced to yell, she smiled.
“Marie,” he said.
“Marie A.,” she corrected.
“You waited,” he said.
“For weeks.”
*
They went for coffee and conversation, and passed a napkin back and forth with jokes and doodles. She smiled and laughed, and at times he did, too.
The coffee went on for weeks. And though he smiled more, though he went home every day with pockets stuffed with hope and napkins, Marie smiled less. Marie tapped her shoe on the table leg and stared out the window, Marie tapped her glitter-painted nails and twirled her coffee stick.
One day, she gave him no post-it. One day, he stepped out of the post office to see she had gone. Even the coffeehouse table stood vacant.
Next day he caught her sleeve. “I waited—”
“So did I.”
“Come with me?”
“Coffee?”
“No.”
Her mouth quirked. “Lead the way.”
*
They spent the day in the park, beneath the plum trees. They walked and spoke of books, of art, of antiheroes and their girls.
Next Sunday they spent the same. She listened, and asked, and teased; but soon her questions drifted, her smile took on weight.
On the third pass beneath the plum trees, he glanced up at the clouds and fingered the folded poem in his pocket. She turned to leave. He grabbed her sleeve.
“Let me go. I’ll be late—”
“For what?”
He offered the poem, and she tucked it in her pocket. They spoke longer. They kissed. Still she left.
“I’ll wait for you here,” he called out, to the back of her head. “Tomorrow. Same time.”
Above them the clouds rolled high and dispersed in the wind.
*
Marie, how late is it, now?
