Между заминаванета/Between departures

It takes little more than the suggestion

of a road to set me off.

The light’s particular

fall on woodland and that promise

of distance recall other terrains,

other journeys made or intended –

and how only last month

scrub silvered hillsides

and mist plumed a lake

en route to a different return.

No, it doesn’t take much to set me off.

A dispersing tangle of vapour trails

is merely the most obvious and I’d go

at the chance of those figs, that coffee,

the cut grass beside half-finished houses,

figures of sand dusting dry pavements

and the noise of headlines left behind.

No, it doesn’t take much to set me off.

And as the suggestions come ever thicker

ever faster, it would seem that – as in

those lines from a poem I’ve yet to write –

the urge to get away isn’t very hard to foster.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

В Борисовата градина/In Boris gardens

And I remember the poets,

the bronze busts lining the path,

and with so few words to rely on –

unable at least to distinguish between

their work and their reputation –

remaining complicit in that silence.

But the living here were intent

on different accommodations

and we resided too in a reunion:

whatever history there was

accumulated in every word –

a friendship coming into focus

as we walked through that heat

and did what we could in photographs

of our jet-trail coincidences –

the ones which brought us up and out

of where we’d been before –

the words which were understood

no matter what the language.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Градината след женитба/The garden after marriage

These days we might recall

how even in a garden we ignored –

its grass clumps tangled

across cracked earth patches –

something was at work to bring

flecks of distant wilderness in

and how, waking in our new state,

with no more to go on than those

who were having to reinvent theirs

in a different kind of aftermath

(the adjustments reported hourly

on the battery wireless by the sink)

we’d be attuning ourselves to birdsong

from washing lines and TV aerials

and that view of a city emerging

from its own divisions which sat

like scenery behind untended borders

where plants we couldn’t name came into bloom.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Отражения на жълт/Reflections in yellow

Like a fountain in a Japanese garden

designed to accentuate silence,

the soft furl of waves at lake’s edge

is as close to peace as we’ll come

on humid days of rainless thunder.

The washed-up spoils we find here –

the fishing floats, corks, edgeless glass –

are not much to shore against thoughts

which flit and dart like midges at the surface

and flense what calm there was.

Something culpable, though, too

in this liquid tristia – as if regret

alone amounted to atonement

for things which were never said

nor snatched by the havering breeze.

In the island monastery’s yard,

his unsearching eyes look up, half-blind

to the clouds’ dispersing vagaries –

and that, for now, is enough

or that’s enough now –

and God is once more that parent

at the side of the road, ushering

children onto the verge, away

from the traffic which veers up

and out of shot beyond the water.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Вкъщи/At home

Where home was once

we strolled, we smiled,

we were happy enough

to stay silent.

On the balcony then,

that narrow balcony,

that’s where we were

by roses overgrown.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips