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Poems by Tsvetanka Elenkova

New poems:

PAIN

When you hold a bottle and hear the wind

through the open throat

when you put a conch to your ear

the echo pain from the emptied body

and when a single slight hiss

as of a punctured bicycle tyre

finally fills the empty space

like a newborn’s wail

Take it carefully in your arms

and give it or don’t to its mother

but take it carefully

it’s so fragile all cartilage

Give it water or leave it on the shelf

by your head

RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL SON

For something to end

an illness an affair

or just a journey

it has first to complete a circuit

a 360º turn

so that the noose tightens

(as in metaphysics)

and where it started from

has no new beginning

so that it’s torn up by the root

or is just a thin shoot

that’ll soon dry up

due to lack of sunlight or moisture

or whatever else

as someone who’s sick seems to get better

before they go

or a flower blossoms

before it withers for ever

How else can we recognise the end

if not by the absence of a beginning

(hence hope in the resurrection

and not in the return of

the prodigal son)

POST

The galaxy is a dog’s fur coat

which opens when you make a parting

and see the road

or make a road with the comb

and then tie bunches with two elastic bands

perfect schoolgirl

the road opens even more

like a swollen river’s dykes

or the bed it’s dug

You drop a paper boat a shell

or just a pooh-stick

and if it doesn’t run aground or sink

it comes out somewhere in the end

like a dandelion-clock that reaches your balcony

You pluck the cuticle and know

it’s a letter from your lover

HOURGLASS

Like the crown of a broad-leaved tree

that’s turned coniferous

we sit in the shade pick its fruit

or build a hut in the branches

to watch the coming storm

or experience it for ourselves

we experience the death of a friend

or relative or our own

and then bottles like New Year

glass trinkets

and then candles lamps

of coniferous trees

we never scale

From The Seventh Gesture:

THE WOUNDS OF FREEDOM

Some buy leather leads for dogs of a definite length. Others prefer automatic leads with a reel. You let the dog run at will but you decide when to retrieve it. I set mine free. But two or three times it ran away and came back covered in wounds, so now I set it free but only in my yard. My dog howls at the squirrels, in the evening at the moon. And when we pile firewood next to the fence it climbs up and jumps over it. And again comes back with wounds. After that I decided to keep it on a chain. For my dog to be free of wounds.

UNDER THE VICTIM’S NAILS

If skin has memory, as doctors maintain, it means the house you leaned on last, the sea you swam in, have not forgotten. Only my dresses have forgotten because I take them to be dry-cleaned or wash them often. But our sea, which is so enclosed streams can’t reach it – the vertical wall under the eaves the wet can’t get to – they have not forgotten. Like a pelican’s bill or a camel’s hump, they save the memory for a rainy day. Like a victim’s nails, which still keep hairs from a killer’s skin.

THE SPARK IN US

There is a wire between the thighs and palate. A wire on which the organs are hung like laundry. Trousers with their two legs, corsets, handkerchieves of various sizes. In a gust of wind the line comes undone and they all fall down. There is a wire that conducts electricity, and at each end a small tongue. Sometimes there’s a short circuit and the electricity board sends someone out. They open the door of the meter affixed to the wall, check the seals, you pay up. If you do not wish to pay, they lay your wire underground.

I WANT YOU EXHAUSTED

I want you exhausted like a blue cloud which has just stopped raining, like a mature brandy, like a snail whose shell has been broken, which ever so slowly descends a steep slope, like laundry which dried long ago, like an old woman’s mottled hands, I want you exhausted like a blue cloud hanging over me, as I wait at a red light and a warm spring breeze rises, melting the snow, sifting the leaves, and we sit in short sleeves at the café tables, I want you exhausted like a sliced liver.

THE SEVENTH GESTURE

With finger on mouth, when you do not want to wake someone or the teacher walks in. He puts a finger to his mouth when he wants to quieten the class. Or he tells you straight to shut up. But what intrigues me most is the way it slides down, pulls away from the lips. After you’ve imposed the silence. Some just loosen their hand, others draw it out to point, others hold it longer like this. And a fold in the fingers, bliss from the tiredness of the unwonted gesture. This is how the Byzantine iconographers first painted them. The saints.

Poems translated from Bulgarian by Jonathan Dunne

An English edition of Tsveta's book The Seventh Gesture is due out in February 2010 with Shearsman Books

Read an essay on Bulgarian monasteries

Read some poems in Bulgarian