Предсказания/Predictions

She swirls the thick rich dregs

then deftly upends our cups

as if she’s about to ask which hides

the wooden ball, token of some prize.

Against the wall’s nail-thick varnish,

the mother-in-law who taught her

stands by her uniformed husband

in a fading hand-tinted photo.

Did she foresee, back then,

how evenings now she’d lean in

at a laptop screen, swapping gossip

via Skype with a son in Detroit?

Or that, in next to no time,

this room, this open window

will be boarded up, the lease

relinquished, the whole farm gone?

For the moment, we’re in her thrall.

Fate intervenes (or doesn’t)

and she’s turning up each cup,

each future, one by one.

We will travel, we’ll spend etc, etc,

until there it is, that look

and, half-smiling, she says:

‘This is his release.’

Somehow, in the shape of cast dregs,

his future shapes up –

between the walls of this elsewhere

we’re happy with her predictions.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Една кратка история на къри/A brief history of curry

For Tom Shakespeare

It would have been in the galley kitchen

at the top of stairs and when, with our fingers

drenched with onion, we crammed docked leaves

and other detritus between folded newspaper pages,

that we cracked a recipe we’d use again and again:

the patent lentil dahl with whipcrack chillies.

If we were chefs, that would be our signature.

If food were a soundtrack to friendship,

that would be our ‘Eat Yourself Fitter’.

We lived on it for years, way beyond

those brief times of necessity and desire

when weekly essays had us up all hours

and we’d be out of the library and into the market

where vegetables looked like trophies

and bulbs of garlic hung like chandeliers.

There was never any recipe. We made things up –

and we still do – improvising with what we’ve got

to hand while the regimented cookbooks sit idle

on the shelves. There was never any plan.

We’d be hungry and that was it: onions,

garlic, chilli and our reading list –

and those open invitations to whoever might be around.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Понеделници/Mondays

Those early morning stints in winter

give way, as they usually do,

to fly-pasts and congregrations.

Crows squawk and finches tweet

while a solitary heron beaches itself

in mud-flat edges, ready to fish.

Circumspect road crossings

announce a few clear seconds:

the rattle of cars over cattle grids,

students plummeting in

to their education – though,

once again, I’m sitting on a bench

before class, hands up

around franchised coffee.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Първа светлина/First light

Dawn burns at the horizon, coal-fire orange

shooting glare at the clouds’ underbelly

and the flat pre-sunrise grey recedes,

letting silhouettes assume their form –

rooftops, outcrops, forest – until

a promiscuous cone of light expands

over city edges, silverback ridges,

and the cusp of sleep eventually withdraws.

Whatever is taking shape is ceasing to be

half-dreamt speculation. The long doubts

foreshorten to a swung-open bathroom door

and a row of air-conditioning units.

Not so very far below, flip-flops slap

on paving slabs as families lug picnics,

towels, inflatables towards the beach

along a shaded, pastel-painted trench.

Up here on the balcony, the tubular steel

of the railing is already warming to the day.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips