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ILLUSION

Has it ever occurred to you

that the world spins into action

the moment you turn the corner?

A taxi-driver hops into his taxi

and backs up the street.

People wend their way home from work,

chatting on their mobile phones.

On the train the driver makes an announcement

to the effect that ‘Westminster Station is closed.’

You helped a foreigner you thought was in distress,

you took him to the embassy.

Once you’ve left,

turned the corner again,

replaced the receiver,

drawn the curtain,

the homeless foreigner and diplomat stand at ease,

the scenery – embassy, sky, trees, pavement –

is rolled away.

And when you close your eyes to blink or sleep

a black sea rolls up to the shore of your mind,

over which you extend your arms like a diver.

And when you dream

you enter the black, velvety water

and sink

in search of corals, shells, pearls,

which you bring to the surface,

dropping them in the moment you awake

so that they twirl and disappear from sight

like a leaf, a sycamore seed,

a dying swan,

white as a star in the night sky.

The stars are the pearls dropped by dreamers who open their eyes.

RIVER

I’m not sure if the world is hostile or friendly,

if it seeks to madden or nurture me,

if the actors are in cahoots against me

or drawing me on to the next question

(an answer is a small death,

having learned the answer, we close the book,

put down the pen,

an answer is a sigh of satisfaction,

a question is to breathe in again)

but sometimes, when I scrutinise the faces of others,

I wonder if they know,

if they have reached the answer at the end of the sigh

and are encouraging me to the same,

a fast-flowing and treacherous river of black water

I will have to go under to reach the other side

the way a horse is taken through by its rider

or St Christopher by a child

and as I step down,

as the water puts its arm around my neck,

hisses in my ears, licks my naked eyes,

I will learn what faith is.

COMMUNION

I sit and the water is pouring out of me.

First the fat is converted,

then the muscles fray and the bones melt,

the veins open,

emptying their contents on the floor.

As my consciousness sinks to the bottom,

I am aware how a hand takes one of the silver candles

and inverts it,

turning the molten flame into a solid nib of gold.

FOOLS

for Juan Marsé

Juan Marsé, a Spanish writer, claims

that, when he was fifteen,

he saw (but did not speak to)

a girl in a green dress, who was beautiful.

Not a day has gone by since then

(he claims)

that he has not imagined that girl in the green dress,

her melancholic eyes, enigmatic smile.

Juan Marsé is now an old man.

Is what he claims true:

that he saw a girl in a green dress, who was beautiful,

and imagines her still every day?

I do not know.

The girl (I would venture) would lead us a merry dance.

Better not to have spoken to her.

Her beauty is not lessened by our walking past.

EXHAUST

Some cars have a single exhaust.

Others have two

and I have even seen them with four.

They come in all shapes and sizes:

round or oval,

straight or curved,

with thin or thick ribbing.

Some stick out the side as on a London taxi.

They have yet to be converted into fashion symbols

though some are given a chrome finish to make them gleam.

Others are positioned unobtrusively

so that they’re not an eyesore.

When it’s cold, you can see them breathe.

They snort like dragons,

they seem to be fuming

(except for the modern ones,

which are tight-lipped and betray no emotion).

THE TICKET INSPECTOR

The ticket inspector

appeared out of nowhere.

‘Tickets please!’

I had not punched mine because

on boarding the bus

there were so many people

I couldn’t get past the stairs.

So I journeyed with my back to the wall,

felt the swish of the door,

how it opened and closed,

admitting and expelling passengers,

breathless rosy children saying ‘It’s warm!’

gaunt men in caps with sunken eyes and bristly skin,

mother hens with their shopping,

a youth so charged for his girl

he barged past without noticing

the effect he had on us.

I can say I enjoyed the journey,

it was well worth the 50 stotinki

of my unpunched ticket I held

in the freedom of the arena

when most people had got off

and we were in the city centre.

I heard an angel say ‘Maybe it’s time, you know…’

but after all the pushing and shoving,

after all the alarms and doors and bells,

I was suspended in a sea of space,

of slothful silence that meant I couldn’t be bothered

to raise my arm.

My delay (in this world) was my downfall.

In the next moment she appeared

as if out of nowhere.

‘But yours isn’t punched’

she said with a knowing look.

I explained about the people when I boarded,

that I couldn’t, there was no way,

but I quickly realised that my words

in the open space surrounding me

were weak as a bulb in daylight,

a punching machine right next to me,

and how in my broken Bulgarian

to describe my sense of ease à la Horace

in the open field of the bus, tending faces…

‘What I say is true’ is all I could say.

I meant to throw the ticket in a bin

but she smirked.

She had been here before,

a woman of all seasons,

and she fined me 5 leva

and pulled out an orange ticket,

which she tore.

I left through the door,

what I say is true,

and the bus pulled away, rattling leaves in its exhaust.

HAIKU

You would bite my ear

as the sun broke through the clouds,

tender from swimming.

AWAKENING

i.m. Joseph Knecht

The light was pouring in

through the window you had opened

when I woke up,

the leaves shimmering in the breeze

like early-morning swimmers.

The light this morning

was an altogether different experience:

not the customary dread of another day,

but how temptation had subsided

to a single pinpoint of darkness,

been replaced by happiness,

a feeling of lightness,

I could flex my shoulders and

breathe in open space,

a dazzlingly white courtyard without spectators

(there being nothing to see or show

since nothing was hidden),

without this world’s constant teasing

(responding to the third dimension:

a hole for our form, and a form for our hole),

and all were welcome,

all had had their burdens lifted,

which didn’t matter anyhow,

all were accepted

and loved

and laughed

in a frankly non-dogmatic, unpessimistic,

non-denominational,

trade-free area that was God.

All secret desires were acknowledged

and without disgrace.

In fact they represented

an integral part of all being

and were loved and respected for that.

All shameful acts

– mass murder, theft, adultery –

were quickly dismissed:

no one ever caused any real harm,

besides, they didn’t understand.

Here was bliss:

all races and religions

lightly embracing in a spiral

for spiritual

dance.

The light was pouring in

through the window you had opened

when I woke up

from my dream,

and the world was no longer

the miserable place we make it,

but the home of an ever and

everyone-encompassing

elite.

From Even Though That:

THINGS

Frank was a non-conformist, which meant he did not conform.

Or at least he did not conform with what he thought was conforming.

He did not wear suits (though he quite liked wearing them).

He did not drive a car.

In fact he did not even like to ride in one.

You see, Frank was a non-conformist.

‘I do not agree with exhaust,’ he would say.

The trouble with not agreeing with exhaust, or non-conforming, which is the same, is the terrible sense of unbelonging. Being foreign. Even to those you love.

His mother was afraid to kiss him.

‘I do not agree with cars,’ he would say, ‘because I do not agree with exhaust.’

He wanted his mother to kiss him.

Alice was a siren who lived by the side of the sea of the sea.

By the side of the sea lived a siren whose name was Alice, Alice.

Alice by the side of the sea.

She lived on the rugged rocks by the side of the Cornish sea.

Alice on the rocks by the side of the Cornish sea.

A rough sea, a milky blue sea, a sea that seethed and swayed and grew like the passing of time in a grandfather clock.

There on the rugged rocks lived Alice.

Her long bistre hair and dewy black eyes many a Cornish sailor had ensnared. And many on her rocks had died.

Her fame (like the sea) had grown and spread and Turkish, Dutch, Italian sailors too had met their end with the cry, ‘All time not spent on love is lost!’

But she was not to be moved.

Her heart had already been occupied like the turtledove whose mate has died.

And the sea grew.

Alice, her long bistre hair and dewy black eyes, on the rocks of the milky blue Cornish sea, where many a sailor has died.

And the sea grew…

POEM FOR THE DAY

Today is like a play

Without actors,

A rainbow without a sky,

A laugh without a face behind,

Two chairs that are empty.

Today is like a chateau

Without a bride,

A mother without a child,

A square without people.

Today is like a wave

Without reply.

An orchestra without a cello.

Today by the side of the lake

You are going to leave me.

Don’t.

THE DAY AFTER MY BIRTHDAY

Hung-over.

The day after my birthday,

which I celebrated by drinking four beers,

the last of which I don’t remember so well,

it sort of merges with the third,

and by eating a half-cooked sauce

on a bed of ironed-out pasta

(I couldn’t bring the water back to the boil,

the gas bottle was empty,

so instead I let the pasta sit

in the boiled water for ten minutes

like an unfranked stamp)

and by watching Titanic in Italian

on a two-inch screen,

having to get up to read the subtitles

of the Russian would-be passengers,

not that it mattered,

I’d seen the film before

(in English and also in Spanish,

the latter seated on a wooden deck-chair

on a requisitioned ball-court

in the Aragonese hills),

until the end,

which I refused to watch,

considering it stupid

to drop the Heart of the Ocean

back into the sea

(in fact, James Cameron came in for quite some invective

from my seat, for his romantic dream.

It’s not like that!).

The noise hasn’t stopped

of mopeds put-putting up the hill,

of machines.

But reading Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters

in this Italian port

under the strong afternoon sun,

with the territorial seagulls playing at being eagles

or Italian army aeroplanes,

and the clinking masts,

and Vivara curved like the husk of a Brazil nut at my feet,

while I wished the noise would stop,

life could be worse.

BESIEGED

My romantic island is a torture.

I have been flung from the noise of the traffic clunking the drain-grate

to the noise of a sander rotating (for four hours now),

like a giant mosquito in the sky’s ear,

on the wood of a boat.

I came here to get away from it all.

For some peace and quiet.

But, running from the decoy,

I have run straight into the trap.

I am like a fly at the window.

The only option: to backtrack to life.

(Opening the window is not an option,

I think.)

TRAFFIC

On Procida, people own houses,

have dogs to guard them,

gates to protect them,

walls to keep out prying eyes.

Everyone drives a car.

There are no pavements,

so you have to walk in the road.

Some people slow down,

but most don’t.

The only quiet places

are the bridge to Vivara

and the cemetery.

Here,

you can hear the birds sing.

The traffic worries me.

It scares me, if I’m honest.

The drivers are blissfully unaware.

They think I am the madman.

Sometimes I process slowly down the middle

(the road is too narrow to pass)

as if I were deaf, had not heard

the crunch of tyres, the driver’s breath revving.

When I’m going in the opposite direction,

I scowl at the drivers,

I scowl with hatred in my heart.

I open the way for them

with a sweep of my arm.

Toro!

They fume, I perspire.

Other times, I splay against the wall

in mock horror

like a starfish.

They think I am the madman.

I don’t know how else to behave.

THE FORECAST FROM GREECE IS GOOD

Try to keep them, poet,

those erotic visions of yours,

however few of them there are that can be stilled.

Put them, half-hidden, in your lines.

Try to hold them, poet,

when they come alive in your mind

at night or in the noonday brightness.

C. P. Cavafy, When They Come Alive in Collected Poems (1998), tr. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

When I arrived on the beach this afternoon,

three Greek beauties lay like levers,

their breasts – which were exposed to the sun –

turning from green to black

olives.

Small wonder that I was amazed

at the pair that lay bruised

of the one on her front,

at the other two lying marooned

on the feta bodies behind her.

Small wonder that I turned away,

scratched my thinning hair,

gave the human race the forecast:

‘Looks set to continue.’

Those girls have gone now.

They popped on their dresses.

Pretty dresses, cotton dresses with flowers and the like.

The beach is almost empty now.

Just the waves lapping the shore.

Bursting with excitement.

Bubbling still.

The way they were yesterday.

The way they will be tomorrow.

We are here one day, gone the next.

We don’t realise it when we hit the shore.

That there’s another wave right behind us,

soon to fall.

The epitaph of a wave might read:

Was born at sea.

Crashed on such and such a beach.

Continues as a current.

IT WAS A BAD DAY

for Tsvetanka Elenkova

It was a bad day.

I was woken by the builders at 7:15.

I was so tired that, working in the morning,

I fell asleep. I wasn’t taking much in

anyway. When I came back for lunch,

they were still at it, this time

drilling on the wall of my room.

Not much, I know, but I’d been hoping

for a kip. I left in a fury,

went walkabout, ended up in the cemetery,

unable to make sense of the living.

The dead weren’t too forthcoming

either, unwilling to let me in

on the secret of all this.

I was just about beat,

so at four I took my work

down to the beach.

It wasn’t a particularly bad day, I know.

It could have been much worse.

Someone could have died or

got sick, or done something awful.

I was tired, that was all,

letting it get on top of me,

until, after a swim, my mouth

parched with salt, she appeared

out of the sun, drilled a

cold drink on to my chest.

Not much, I know, but it made

me feel a whole lot better.

I looked up then and took it all in.

THE SCORPION

The scorpion just came to the wrong place at the wrong time.

It wasn’t to know.

It waddled towards us, content almost,

as if it had news to convey,

some juicy gossip, a joke, something like that.

You could tell it had something inside it wanted to get out.

But we don’t speak its language,

and it was heading straight for the dull, yellow light

of our front door.

Lisa jumped up, skipped off in search of a broom,

returned like a gymnast across the mat.

That scorpion didn’t have long to live,

I could have told it that.

It hit the step before our front door,

took a detour.

It may have changed its mind,

been heading out of our lives,

in search of someone else to talk to,

someone a bit more receptive,

someone who spoke its language.

But it was too late for that.

I leapt outside, turned

as Lisa raised the broom (the axe),

took aim as the scorpion cleared the step

(stairs were not an obstacle then),

brought down the broom,

missed!

raised it (the scorpion was fighting an invisible enemy now),

took aim for the second time…

The scorpion’s last vision of life

will have been a broom hurtling out of space –

a spasm – and Lisa washed down the tiles

and Torborg asked if scorpions were dangerous.

Read some short stories

Read some poems translated into Bulgarian