Friday 28 October 2016

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







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


Friday 14 October 2016

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

Friday 7 October 2016

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



Saturday 1 October 2016

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