Тези неща/These things

And now as things close in –

these questions unanswered

like the prows of boats

which sit and bob

in the afterflow

of opened lock gates

or the dart and dive

of seagulls strutting and fretting

on streets between apartment blocks –

we’re doing our best.

Love might be no more

than a question mark

but here at least we’re sure

as we’re ever likely to be –

deploying the same old signs,

old hands at this old game,

which we know now somehow

as well as we’re going to:

these habits and conditionalities,

the words we’ll say,

the flowers on the table,

this morning routine.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Познанието/The knowledge

All day struggling with vocabulary –

not lost for words or lost in translation,

but taunted by the prospect

of the ever-impossible mot juste

(so impossible we’ve had to borrow the term).

The gist, then, anyway emerges

like those blocks which sharpened

from the dawn on my first day in Sofia:

how I remember that –

first coffee, first cigarette –

a while before the archetypes advanced

across some Jungian field

and I’m answering to

whatever it is I don’t understand,

reaching for and then grasping

that precipitous apple.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Сезонна гледка/Seasonal view

It’s autumn. No other way to say it.

The nights are indeed drawing in

and suspended between branch and eave

an all-too-sharp spider is farming its trap.

Fruitful the colours, though,

as harvest mellows into decomposition

and the promise of winter on the tongue

stings with its hint of bitterness

as if there was any way to prevent

or divert the passage of the seasons

into early nightfall, the long dark

which presages those first dawns

of a warm and pre-emptive spring.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Повтаряне/Recurrence

Perhaps I am going to say this again

because recurrence is natural and

it seems that I have been here before.

Red flowers in white vases might be

a kind of landmark, a kind of punctuation –

a combination that reappears

but makes no specific demands.

Each time there are the same clusters

of petals, lines grooved into porcelain.

In my mother’s house or ours,

we’d take them for granted

and then regret it – these reminders

of what? Some thought about beauty

not being found in the everyday

but being an integral part of it.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Повтаряне/Recurrence

Perhaps I am going to say this again

because recurrence is natural and

it seems that I have been here before.

Red flowers in white vases might be

a kind of landmark, a kind of punctuation –

a combination that reappears

but makes no specific demands.

Each time there are the same clusters

of petals, lines grooved into porcelain.

In my mother’s house or ours,

we’d take them for granted

and then regret it – these reminders

of what? Some thought about beauty

not being found in the everyday

but being an integral part of it.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Гадатели/Seers

Beyond a landscape of hedgerows,

socket puddles, cisterned water,

the unadopted lane runs out

to a slick of mists. The hard shape

of a gate is a buried grid –

we lean on it and blow smoke rings

into softened autumnal air.

And it’s as if that moment’s

returning, gaining definition

without our knowing,

and we might see through

to something thickening.

We were 17. It was cold.

Across that willow waste,

the trees articulated promise.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips