Езеро с лодка/Lake with boat

We might do this,

go out through the city’s

diminishing suburbs,

apartment blocks,

industrial estates,

the slip-roads,

human tarmac envelope,

and keep going until

we’re pulling over

in some lay-by

and crunching steps

along a gravel path

which narrows

and then gives out.

We might do this

and track a way

through trees,

the ardent foliage,

gnats clouding

liminal sunlight,

to the limit

of a glaucous lake

and my offering to

row out to where

we’ll be sat above

the viscid spaces

into which fish

and uncertainties glide.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Пролет/Spring

How these newcomers must see us

on this first warmish day

when daffodils hold their own

and winter hangs around

at the cusp of memory.

In the street, we’re talking

about parking arrangements,

box-shifting, the bollards

put out for a moving in,

a jazz gig in another country.

As the recently eclipsed sun

goes down, I can hear myself

reiterating the words of welcome

in a cacophony of languages.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Приятелството се случва/Friendship happens

Held up by a sandwich packet’s refusal

to fold and slip through the slot of a bin,

I couldn’t have known how

this recalcitrant plastic and cardboard

was playing its part in circumstance –

that, no more than six months later,

I would be sitting on a balcony

in Druzhba or, another year on,

receiving gifts in Boris Gardens.

There was little hint of spring

in that chilly March evening

and an all-but-empty lecture hall.

At the very edge of the moment

when the day might have

begun to close like any other,

a still, small voice interrupted

my delay. Six months later,

I would be sitting on a balcony

in Druzhba and, another year on,

receiving gifts in Boris Gardens.

13 March marks the anniversary of the meeting two years ago which led to Colourful Star.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

В кухнята/Kitchen poem

At night dreams merge.

It’s as if there’s something

I can’t avoid – the flight

upwards and outwards

over alps and plains.

In the kitchen,

we’re well met.

In the kitchen,

dreams merge.

This room

is for friends.

The guests

are on the balcony.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Баба Марта/Baba Marta

Midwinter spring and sunlight strains

beyond terracotta rooftops: the year

is already poised in the balance

as if because we lack faith it would go,

become ceaseless cumulo-nimbus,

a drowning of prospects in cotton wool.

Except no. Because this is something

others have known from on old:

seasons hint and need placation

like unexpected loves which depend

on linden branches in a park,

like these assertions that all will be well,

like a ripeness and a readiness

which here, amongst the red and white,

I confidently thought to tell.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Керамика/Ceramics

It is all potential:

us, beneath this,

a concrete council building,

where a 75 or 77

will growl to a stop

on my first visit

to our future home town.

Unfamiliar shop frontages,

lit for an autumn evening,

are signals I fail to decipher,

flashes along our progress

to your mysterious address.

Walking up and around

the pub where we would drink,

the office where I would work,

we’re arriving outside

the house which, long before that,

(but sooner than we think)

we would come to share.

In your room, on the sill,

are the bowls and vases you’ve made

working the summer in a pottery

and I’m just in the doorway, clay-like, still.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

За любов/For love

It’s not so much to say, a few breaths

adding up to an indication, a hint

at what we might be revealing:

words which slump into meaning,

a promise and a memory –

the best that we might hope for, actually.

After so long, I will step into the kitchen,

ingrained with borrowed jargon, toying

with mistaken punctuation, that world

they think they’ve created –

and recall the fence where lovers left

their padlocks when I was, as you know it,

not so far away in Dubrovnik.

 Here, then, is spring and the roses:

the start of it, a coming home.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips