*little darling (Bulgarian)
Father climbing to the stars
In the strangest dream my father –
a compressed, stubborn angel
climbs the tree outside holding
an obscure orange instrument
in the strangest dream my father always
falls interminably, like a curled leaf
through the seasons of my life
in slow motion (or is he just lighter
than the rest?)
When he hits ground, I am far away
I have more white hair than he
and when he hits ground I know
I won’t wake up because
in dreams you never hit ground
(or is he, for once, breaking the rules?)
Yes, and I wake up to see my father
climbing the tree outside,
severing the highest branches with
an obscure orange instrument
he won’t stop before the tree is just a trunk
he’s making way for the light
(I complain of sudden darkness)
But now I complain the neighbours can see me
through the bleeding gap of the tree
and my father with the dead branches weaves
a fence, protecting me from any gaze
At night, when I sit by the window,
bathed in a ray of haemophilic light,
under a foreign sky,
my father will be still
climbing some stairway, my father
will rearrange the stars
in a pattern less dissonant to my eyes.
Going home
I like to play outside.
I like to juggle with rotten apples
and teach dead birds to fly,
watch the neighbours’ cats mate
violently, as if for the last time,
hear the hedgehogs sigh
with human voices.
I like to play outside all night,
safe, because all the windows are closed
and the keys turned in the locks.
I like to play because then
I can go home in the morning.
In the winter
The fifth season of Dunedin
the sky is a marble tomb
descending on this town
casting angular shadows
across these faces where
the illusion of summer
has lasted too long where
the discontent of another,
stranger season remembers itself
and the only memory is that of making
the bed in the morning
undoing the bed at night
and watching a sunspot move
imperceptibly on the edge
of the round kitchen table, never
in the middle in the middle
was the ocean harder than stone
or darker than any sky
These days are the sleeping
faces of winter smooth
like frozen lakes
we swim underneath almost visible
through the ice
our hands are bloodless, our feet
cold stone are pulling us under
every time we forget not to look
through the roof of these days
a sun is almost visible
and we wait as we always wait
every winter
for the snowchildren
to wave from sun swings
and disappear.
In the winter
1
In the winter
I stripped your skin,
it was so white I thought
I did it for love and yes
I did, I gave you a new one, better.
I gave you lessons. I taught you
how to be normal, how to be like me,
I really loved you.
You listened and you took
everything I gave you, you really loved me.
But one day I saw you standing
on the other side of so many
frosty roads, you were wearing
your old skin inside out,
you were entering another summer, elsewhere.
2
I was the worst person to disappoint
but you were betrayed by your body.
Having had a snow-fight over
the role of winter in the withering
of the heart and the body,
having wanted to live and not remember
but secretly remembering
and only pretending to live,
having never been rich or famous
but never lost our excessive
attachment to objects we couldn’t have,
there was still much to do and say
but we were far too sophisticated,
the temperature was falling,
and though you were the worst person
to let down, I was betrayed by my mind.
Pine Hill or elsewhere
This house looks no different from the others
but it’s the last house on this last hill.
There was a sense of unease in us
for a long time, as we climbed this hill
as the sky grew bigger and windier
there was a sense of ending.
Now we know, it’s because
this is the end of the world
and this is the last house on the last hill
before the sky begins.
The sky begins from the back door, the wind
begins a little further, and the fog
and the snow and the dream of elsewhere though
we know there’s no such place.
Some days the sky moves in
and out of the door in and out,
the dogs bark
the electricity crackles
the TV screen has been
painted over for twenty years now
in other words, the house is ready to take off.
But soon the more ordinary days follow
and we wake up on the same day again
and begin to paint.
We are the last and best painters
of dead clouds going elsewhere.
Storm
I see your face as you run from me,
as I leave you, I take root in you
So we go down the hill under
the fine stonework of the sky
broken by trickles of light
We go down crying the names
of places where we wouldn’t want to be
because they are too much like here
The world, in the end, is too small
to hide each other and
ourselves
We are lost in the many
Sundays to follow, emptied by wind
and filled with stones fallen from the sky
Some day you’ll be the only face
I’ll recognise in the foreign
landscapes of my life
I’ll be the only one to see you
running from the storm
on the edge of lightning
Sick of the sea
In the winter of our discontent
the sea was cold
and in the summer of our despair – also.
We are sick of seeing the sea
of hearing the sea
of tasting it
of licking our wounds
metallic and salty.
But for those without faith
there is no other season
there is only the sea
cold throughout the year
carrying unwanted Sundays
like sea-birds travelling
on slow waves
towards the wet beaches
of our palms where nothing grows
where we draw with sticks
our long names
and small hearts
where everything
including the sea-birds
is neatly washed out
on the next day.
Summary
1 some nameless fruit crashes
to the ground where I pass every day on my way to school
asking the deaf woman’s pet ‘what day is it?’
the pet’s paws and my hands
are covered in seeds and fruit blood
(I walk upside down, hoping
to induce the same inverse
motion in time)
2 ‘mother, the mirror surprises you every day
just as it surprised your mother’
says my daughter implying that
life beyond forty is a shameful secret
which shouldn’t be passed on
(my daughter who wears
two watches, to make sure
time doesn’t slip by
my daughter whose belly grows)
3 a soft stone that never touches bottom
a presence that swells, the more I try
to name it, a voice that isn’t mine but me
a lake bottom, a fish, a splash
(that’s how I sleep,
respected and forgotten,
certain that nothing
will be left of me)
Snow
We wake up and nothing weighs less than snow;
the curtains betray its light.
Snow conceals a smell the freezing works of time
would have if we dwelled on it all day. That’s why
we are afraid to open the curtains;
snow isn’t always the opposite of mourning –
the blackbird swings on a branch, knowingly.
Snow appears only in the morning
but while we slept, it weighed on our sleep.
Who knows how long we slept?
Absent-mindedly
Absent-mindedly, you stand against the sky
this frozen mess of water
is not the colour of your eyes today
is where i won’t find you when you die
is where you’ll never go
where are you, except before me
here and now, who are you except your name
and why do i forget that i
probably love you (though who is it i love?)
you wear a T-shirt of clouds today
as you always do on a tuesday
(though it’s wednesday – why do you always forget?)
you have shaven half your face again
it shines through the obscurity of life like
fake gold,
the other half forgotten, turned away
i speak of you as if you’re
terminally ill (are you?)
i think of you in the second person, as if
you can hear me
i see you deftly eluding me
ducking under the rainbow
i painted carefully around you
in the end, when i forget everything, I want
to watch the sky, this frozen mess of water
drip through your eyes like an answer
Natural phenomena
The wind, the snow
these natural phenomena,
find me prickly with doubt like a sick cactus
in this badly insulated house
and I ask the melancholic
snowmen dancing around the house,
all looking like somebody I must’ve known once:
how can I not hear the doors flapping
like the broken arms of someone
with a fantasy of flying? (excuse the anthropocentric
comparison, I say to them)
yes, it’s natural and even Spartan
not to have many visitors walk through the doors
in this weather: they don’t because
a heap of snow remains in the doorway,
memory’s body, even whiter than your faces
remains, for what can we do, struck and surrounded
by Nature, faceless like countless tiny enemies,
except refuse to thaw?
The wind, the snow, these natural phenomena,
will leave me one day, and so will the snowdancers
who resemble someone less and less
while retaining their melancholy.
One day even the winter will expire
in a pool of unnatural thoughts.
Territory of doubt
I have a fantasy: it’s the wildest I have, the only one.
It only goes beyond the freshly elapsed moment:
it’s to believe that what I see is all there is
that while I’m outside, the phone can’t ring
while the sun irradiates my wakeful skin
nobody anywhere sleeps in a darkness so complete
it can’t exist without swallowing the sleeper,
so complete that while I sleep, nothing
can be undreamt.
That my spring can’t be anybody’s winter
my dinner anybody’s suicide, but above all
that the opposite is true – how can anyone take a highway
of palm-trees and suns, when it’s raining down here,
and the car is broken?
I spend my days not knowing how to ask with dignity:
please, someone tell me that all there is
is what I see
(and not what I glimpse, suspect or hear lurking
in the unspeakable elsewhere)
someone tell me that between two blinks, two heartbeats,
the devil and the deep blue sea,
between the irreparable clichés
of sunrise and sunset,
in that territory of doubt, there’s nothing more
and nothing less
than a windowful of easy sky.
All roads lead to the sea
Envy
I envy you.
Your restlessness,
patient and curable,
will take you anywhere
and back.
Meanwhile, having seen
the beginning of the world
and the end of my curiosity
having wanted
to be everywhere at once
I remain frozen
in my special look
of premature wisdom
drinking cups of rainwater
from a discontented sky.
Daywalking to the sea
This is a déjà-vu:
a late afternoon,
under a dusk-driven sky,
promising yet another darkness
deeper and more lasting than any
house-fire can dispel.
Why shiver and change shape, imitating
a cloud on the verge of electrical execution?
these spaces of no-tomorrow are uncrossable.
We remain in the hour of no-release. The sky
faking a calm before the storm is only calm
and once again means nothing.
This is a déjà-vu: five o’clock, an hour of trying
to retrieve a memory from cold-lit windows,
a memory of things which could’ve never been real,
otherwise we wouldn’t be here,
otherwise descending in these hanging gardens
of darkness would be a wonder, not
the nightmare of a daywalker …
Why do we seek to merge with the last sound of rage
that swells as we get closer? we know that when we reach
the bottom of the hill, the sea always disappears.
The road to Roxburgh
All roads lead to the sea, says the driver
and then talks to a passenger about
living in Roxburgh,
about the weather, taxes and his teenage
daughter who studies home science
and has a boyfriend mechanic.
Meanwhile the bus cuts through
landscapes frozen in the wind
they are th
e memories of buses cutting
through the lonely landscapes of the mind
in some other country in some
other life with someone else
sitting in the next seat
someone who had the same
graceful abandon while sleeping,
through empty towns called Roxburgh –
all turned to the sea and seeing
nothing but themselves,
through vast, imperceptible reflections
of the sky and shadows broken against the hills
through the same wind whistling false
memories laughing at our lost faces saying
in the driver’s voice
All roads lead to the sea.
A river runs through my head, willows grow out of my ears. I know that the pleasure of loneliness doesn’t last.
Virginia Zakharieva, from ‘A late afternoon quadrille’
There are nights when every book is a tombstone
that doesn’t open and doesn’t close, and contains no
valid secrets. Alive in this cemetery,
you have no alternative lives, nor can you prove
that you have a life of your own.
The town has a pulse, somewhere, you know no one in town,
or perhaps they don’t know you.
There is nature, surrounding the town, but you
have no affinity with ‘nature’ – she is serene
around your fretful body.
Everything just is
and nothing is enough on these nights
so much like all other nights:
inside the closed tombs you gaze at skeletons
of truths you understand but cannot use.
All Roads Lead to the Sea Page 2