Friday 21 October 2016

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