За сестри и музи/For sisters and muses

In this thickness of forest,

I might have been half done by:

you know the kind of thing –

out of breath or off the map,

midway through life

and imagining the unimaginable.

Only that was what it was,

just there, a word or two,

a phrase that spiralled out

and up and between and told

of endlessness, a silence,

the endless possibilities.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Мяста в вселената/A place in the universe

The spark of a thought is an arc

out into slingshot space,

gravitational accelerants,

spectacular as stars

whose evanescence

lit fixities for cartographers,

though nothing’s solid

but we think it so.

Relatively speaking,

we turn out to be no more

nor less than this

quintessence,

each one of us passing through

states of wave-particles,

unpatented, subject to –

and of – a vast

unmappable terrain

where thought projects,

no longer just bending minds,

but bending space and time.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Пак друг чайник/Again another kettle

At some point a coincidence, a joining of dots:

a red sheen as one of the specifics,

a kettle with apples and all that suggests.

In the mountains I was lost

amongst landscapes that reared and bucked

without pretence (though easily seen that way).

And then brought home

to lights that flashed beyond these blocks.

Promises of my return, newly familiar scene

at this distance from where

with some hope I might belong.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Листак/Foliage

 

A mystery of woodland, do you remember?

That planned, adopted chaos of underbrush

on the route leading up to Mentmore Towers?

They came out from Luton in their Ford Cortinas,

parked on concreted turn-offs, thought

this was the height of romance, lights out,

the sunset bleeding over ploughed earth.

We were brats (no other word for it),

sneaking up out of the darkness, like extras

in Lord of the Flies, to bang on steamed windows,

then make a run for it through convenient scrub.

Each time we might have been so easily caught –

here on this shaped and archaic landscape

not so far from where decisions had been made

whose consequences played out here –

here where we had no idea what history lurked

between parked cars and would-be lovers

escaping some great vision for the future

not so different from those striated gothic facades

from which everything once must have seemed

uncluttered, safe, unchaotic.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips