В килера/The larder

A half-dark lined with cooling tiles,

her larder’s lowered temperature

had a feel of spring throughout the year.

A sliced ham hock’s moon face

among cheeses wrapped in paper,

onions pulled only that day

from their patch behind the house –

and the smells of the place like a kind

of promise. To be sent in there to fetch

and carry was to step back through years

of graft and preservation – those seasons

of bottling, pickling, salting.

It will have gone now, taken out

by those who’d improve the place

sold on probate not so long ago.

No room for a larder in the modern house –

although you might find traces of it again

in a fruit and veg shop’s ranked fennel bulbs,

the slick shuck of leek leaves, the tang

of vinegar from a newly reopened jar.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Временен отдих/A momentary reprieve

Grey clouds muscling in on higher sunlit banks

accumulate like signs of uncertainty now

we’re hurrying home across a makeshift bridge

and unable to face catching each other’s eye.

The rain holds off for only so long –

until here we are, drenched by a deluge

we should have had the sense to see coming.

This might be the season’s hope dispersing

in petals washing down through storm gutters

and somewhere a shrill finch silencing its song.

Only clearing now, the sky’s mood has gone

and ours might lift too at each flower left intact

on the rosebush cascades, a ripening sheen

emerging into view, spreading out along the street.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Географията/The geography

From another side of Europe,

intimations of how we might

fit in. And there, yes,

the suggestion of sap rising

and rain coming down.

In the early nineteenth-century,

John Smith, picture dealer,

took ship for St Petersburg,

spent guineas he’d earned

from sales of gilt.

For him, the continent

was an opportunity.

He took it – and thrived,

named his house for the town

in Holland where he apprenticed.

And then on to Russia

and The Hermitage,

ahead of his time

and the geography.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Дървото на череши в Hamilton Road/The cherry tree in Hamilton Road

The lopped branch has put the tree in a sulk.

That’s the technical term we learnt

from the arborealist who came to treat

the exuberant cherry he would cut.

They’d built our houses on orchard land,

terraces ranked – for all their ideals –

according to social status. Ours was in

the mid-range – though these days

it’s not so hard to be priced out of the market.

Every year we still get fruit from it,

but the cherry tree’s not so happy with us now.

It sulks – that is the word – by the fence

and lets the finches in there first.

On summer mornings, perhaps,

we’ll get up early and catch it unawares.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

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