Friday 28 August 2015

За сестри и музи/For sisters and muses


In this thickness of forest,
I might have been half done by:
you know the kind of thing –
out of breath or off the map,
midway through life
and imagining the unimaginable.

Only that was what it was,
just there, a word or two,
a phrase that spiralled out
and up and between and told
of endlessness, a silence,
the endless possibilities.

Friday 21 August 2015

Мяста в вселената/A place in the universe


The spark of a thought is an arc
out into slingshot space,
gravitational accelerants,
spectacular as stars
whose evanescence
lit fixities for cartographers,
though nothing’s solid
but we think it so.

Relatively speaking,
we turn out to be no more
nor less than this
quintessence,
each one of us passing through
states of wave-particles,
unpatented, subject to –
and of – a vast
unmappable terrain
where thought projects,
no longer just bending minds,
but bending space and time.



Friday 14 August 2015

Пак друг чайник/Again another kettle



At some point a coincidence, a joining of dots:
a red sheen as one of the specifics,
a kettle with apples and all that suggests.

In the mountains I was lost
amongst landscapes that reared and bucked
without pretence (though easily seen that way).

And then brought home
to lights that flashed beyond these blocks.

Promises of my return, newly familiar scene
at this distance from where
with some hope I might belong.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips


Friday 7 August 2015

Листак/Foliage

 

A mystery of woodland, do you remember?
That planned, adopted chaos of underbrush
on the route leading up to Mentmore Towers?
They came out from Luton in their Ford Cortinas,
parked on concreted turn-offs, thought
this was the height of romance, lights out,
the sunset bleeding over ploughed earth.
We were brats (no other word for it),
sneaking up out of the darkness, like extras
in Lord of the Flies, to bang on steamed windows,
then make a run for it through convenient scrub.
Each time we might have been so easily caught –
here on this shaped and archaic landscape
not so far from where decisions had been made
whose consequences played out here –
here where we had no idea what history lurked
between parked cars and would-be lovers
escaping some great vision for the future
not so different from those striated gothic facades
from which everything once must have seemed
uncluttered, safe, unchaotic.