All Roads Lead to the Sea Read online

  All roads lead to the sea

  All roads lead to the sea

  KAPKA KASSABOVA

  To the memory of my grandmother Anastassia Bahchevandjieva-Atanasova

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Going home

  Song of the snake

  Associations

  i Exotic bird speaks

  ii Apolonia

  iii Summer 1996

  Gypsy wedding

  The immigrant cycle

  i Lament

  ii Weather

  iii Security

  iv Bloodlink

  v Razor salesman

  vi Laughing with the immigrant

  vii Sister struggling with the words

  viii Ghosts on the phone

  ix Song of the Stranger

  Father climbing to the stars

  Going home

  In the winter

  The fifth season of Dunedin

  These days are the sleeping …

  In the winter

  Pine Hill or elsewhere

  Storm

  Sick of the sea

  Summary

  Snow

  Absent-mindedly

  Natural phenomena

  Territory of doubt

  All roads lead to the sea

  Envy

  Daywalking to the sea

  The road to Roxburgh

  There are nights …

  Windows: variations on Magritte

  Poem without kites

  Icarus

  Without the bottle

  Disbelievers by the sea

  Road nocturne

  Summer’s affirmative

  Insularity

  Walking out of the party

  The road at the end of town

  Leaving the island

  Copyright

  Going home

  Song of the snake*

  On cold stone three metres deep you lay, my child, not sleeping, not awake, crying:

  please remind me

  of the meaning of now

  when everything is elsewhere

  and someone else’s

  remind me of the memory of it

  when now is nothing

  let me forget, you said.

  I could say nothing, I was the snake under the stone.

  * According to an old Bulgarian belief, sitting on stones is dangerous, because under every stone lies a snake.

  Associations

  i Exotic bird speaks

  So far I even doubt my name

  is the place of burgeoning roses

  and grapes that burst

  at the mere thought of them.

  So constant and hard to contain

  is its absence, while mine there

  is invisible.

  That’s how it is: those who leave

  are never remembered by unrequited lovers,

  never missed by the lonely poplars in autumn.

  I’ve made it to this next life,

  as an exotic bird I’ve learnt to speak

  this gentle language of oblivion,

  of severed names.

  ii Apolonia

  I know, a white sphinx on the Black

  cliff of a sea can’t miss me,

  there is no trace of me there, only

  the graffiti I would’ve scribbled

  had I known I’d need to leave a trace.

  But Apolonia doesn’t care anymore;

  it simply knows, and I don’t.

  The sphinx of course is only

  a half-demolished Greek school

  and the spell has long been broken,

  but something persists,

  wells up in the sockets,

  something other than

  the compulsory ash of time –

  and finally, I remember:

  Apolonia is complete.

  The sphinx with its broken wings

  and obsolete riddles,

  the cobblestones on which

  a dropped needle can be heard

  from the high windows where

  mummified women in black

  mend their ragged memories,

  the boats all called Apolonia,

  all coming back to this port,

  the perfect spirals

  of the red-eyed gulls …

  All that is never the same,

  persists, persists,

  and no one is missed there.

  I want to remain for a long time

  crouched on that high cliff,

  humming with the sand,

  the calm, inconsolable Black Sea

  closed like a lid over my eyes.

  iii Summer 1996

  Is summer enough, when you see

  a forgotten, aching self in faces

  struck by other, less gentle seasons?

  The question is answered when the listeners

  wail in the dawn a long ‘Why?’, oblivious of dignity

  and dignity oblivious of them;

  when the sirens of ambulances are broken,

  the wails of the dying replace them here,

  don’t be surprised: this is Bulgaria, as we say;

  yes, there are large, kerchiefed women here,

  they rock interminably in the silent corners

  of this hushed and obscure crease of geography;

  there are black-eyed brides floating peacefully

  on the Danube, flowers in their hands,

  there are dusty, carnal summers, and dancing bears in chains;

  there are also nine million dishevelled sceptics

  lying on clouds of cherry blossoms and pollution,

  waiting for any damned god to come and save us.

  Gypsy wedding

  Somewhere, unseen and festive,

  they weave a hungry dance

  in the wheat fields where they grow

  without bread, because this is the Balkans.

  They croon to the moon, and when it’s ripe

  they pluck it: pure copper lights the field

  like tears light the charcoal eyes, or mischief.

  When, on a stagnant afternoon,

  a brass band jumps out

  of a hat, fake gold jingles

  and ribbon rainbows fly,

  there is a moment in this Balkan twilight

  when the trumpets shine happy

  and the white-smiled bride is sixteen.

  The immigrant cycle

  i Lament

  We came and found paradise, but something was missing,

  something in the water, in the sky, in the movement

  of hands that couldn’t laugh, or embrace,

  or punish

  ‘they have no soul here, dushi nyet,

  only sheep and empty roads

  and full shops, but where is the soul?’

  ‘I try to explain to mother in my letter, about life

  here, but she doesn’t understand – they buy the bread

  with dollars too, over there?’

  we sing during the day, grind our teeth at night,

  and try to lock away the murmur of the Black Sea

  which has no tides, and hums in the summer

  and is always there

  ‘back in Zagreb, to have a boat was my dream

  so I build one, I call it Esperanza, I was about

  to sail it on Sunday, then the war started’

  our children have the large, moist eyes of wounded deer

  but must betray no signs of weakness,

  they must be winners

  or nothing

  our children know all the songs,

  all the shows, all the jokes,

  they try to learn the memories too,<
br />
  our children are like the rest

  it’s a sign of fluency to dream in a language,

  but we dream wide-awake and in silence,

  we think about our dreams

  in broken sentences

  ‘they do not understand

  they won’t understand

  they can’t understand’

  we stand alone and stubborn, we spend years

  looking for a crack in the neighbour’s wall,

  but only find

  a key

  we came looking for paradise, and paradise we found

  but it wasn’t enough, so we wept,

  and talked about leaving

  and never left.

  ii Weather

  The clouds’ journey is always improvised,

  we have no time to follow.

  Insidious, on days like this

  the dream of elsewhere chokes the heart

  and the illusion

  of something happening elsewhere

  becomes the dream of home.

  So left behind we howl

  home

  home

  we go in circles

  stray dogs chasing their tails

  until the clouds slowly return

  to cry upon us.

  iii Security

  After the long day

  my father locks the doors,

  the windows, the blinds on the windows,

  he locks out the voice of the wind,

  the question

  of yesterday

  whatisit whatisit whatisit

  My mother turns off every light

  in every room, in every cupboard,

  she turns off the TV,

  the red light of the heart flashing

  whatisit whatisit

  the last star

  in this forever foreign sky

  And carefully they lie in bed listening

  to the sound of growing children.

  iv Bloodlink

  In the windy spaces of your future

  they appear,

  at dim doorways

  one after another, and over again

  always them but so other

  so other and so like you

  they move towards you with open hands

  and worried hearts

  they fit into the smallest

  memory they stand

  like awkward giants

  at the broken window of your life

  they walk in unfathomed and familiar

  they speak all at once and every word

  like an absence leads elsewhere

  to a black and white world where

  happiness is simpler and like

  a light sleeper breathes

  on the brink of vanishing.

  v Razor salesman

  olive-skinned and unshaven behind the wheel

  the salesman is weary but there is

  a devastating charm about the salesman

  impossible to justify intangible

  only caught in the outer corner

  of the dreaming eye

  the salesman is Yugoslavian

  balances on the verge of speaking

  lights a cigarette

  and doesn’t say much until the sun has crawled

  its way to the other side of the globe where

  ‘my cousins and brothers

  are cutting each other’s throats’

  he hates his life of a salesman

  going from door to door,

  from town to town

  alone in this car packed

  with boxes of razors

  always saying the same shit

  driving until there’s nowhere

  left to go under the bloody sun until

  all the razors are sold and all

  the wars silenced

  and then

  then maybe he could go home

  vi Laughing with the immigrant

  for Liliana G.

  The immigrant is not even dust in the hollow eyes

  of her country’s bodiless statue.

  The immigrant exists by definition as other,

  though she doesn’t know it, just as you don’t know her.

  Who will catch the distant and disquieting forms

  her mind takes in such ordinary and pleasant moments

  when you laugh together?

  You’ll be forever puzzled to know that

  like a wolf, at night she laughs to the moon,

  in an incomprehensible and indecent lament:

  how the sun’s shepherd plays his gadulka* with crumbling fingers of clay,

  how Pirin mountain shimmers whitely in the polluted air,

  how pine-trees sway and whistle in unspeakable winds,

  how the sea at night is black and swollen with fish

  that know everything but die at sunrise,

  how salty, scarlet stalactites grow in her heart’s caves

  at the speed of burning grass,

  how dark and how luminous are the labyrinths

  of the old, cruelly shaped Peninsula of wars where she,

  a sick minotaur, still wanders,

  how precariously she hangs from the edge of a lake,

  her feet touching your firm foreign ground where

  so many tread in peace.

  Only her feet have arrived in this land where you laugh together.

  With savagery you or she would never suspect

  in her, she has drowned the language of her blood.

  The dissonance of an immigrant life is so

  quiet to the ear.

  vii Sister struggling with the words

  out of the unquestionable

  silence those words gush

  words of puzzling familiarity

  no, words remembered

  no, words forever present

  no, words beyond words:

  spell out everything

  that surpasses language

  draw the hunched,

  impossible silhouette

  of your solitude, sister,

  the words:

  sing songs about love and the Balkans

  in your bruised and confused ear,

  on the edge of your newly

  acquired otherness

  linger heavily

  the words:

  bleed on the tip of your

  tongue that every minute

  clicks so gently

  with the gentle sounds

  of another world, english

  english english do you speak

  hush out the other noises

  the words:

  last and first and only ones,

  mean dushentze*

  splinters under your nails,

  old coins over the eyelids

  of your sleeping face,

  mean the thump of your wandering heart,

  sister,

  the words demand, persist, live on

  and one day,

  perhaps, will answer

  the black gush in your dawn:

  whose life are you living?

  viii Ghosts on the phone

  they were two of a kind and now

  they live elsewhere

  from each other

  or just elsewhere

  they live in foreign lands,

  in lush lands, in rich lands

  on both sides of a forgotten country

  they call there but never

  by its real name, never home

  never Home, they don’t know why

  I’m one of them,

  I am the one who called the other day

  the other night

  why do you call,

  he said

  haven’t you anything better

  to do but call ghosts

  in the middle of my summer?

  I’m in love, and there are

  a hundred thousand miles

  between us

  and six hundred and fifty two days

  of sile
nce

  we’re not ‘there’ and never

  will be again, why do you call?

  I said,

  I call because

  I’m in the middle of winter,

  and the stars here have frozen in patterns

  you and I never saw ‘there’, and never will

  I call because I’m not in love

  unless you count ghosts,

  I call because I haven’t said Home

  in three years and fifty two days,

  and now that I’m at it,

  here is why I call

  we were two of a kind, and you

  are the other one, aren’t you still,

  aren’t you, but whoever you are, I’ve nothing

  better to do, how have you been?

  ix Song of the Stranger

  There is such a thing as

  excessive peace

  it creeps up on the stranger like fog

  and happiness, this otherwise

  precise outline of an absence

  becomes irrelevant, like a ghost

  in the fog.

  There is a place where

  the only war is in the form of

  small eruptions of rain poetry

  on a Sunday afternoon

  where taking a breath can last

  up to a minute, or possibly a lifetime

  where the sky looks the stranger

  in the eye with no fear

  where fern has the intricate simplicity

  of sadness

  and a herd of clouds grazing on thunder

  follows the stranger

  all the way to the middle of the ocean

  but never beyond.

  * Bulgarian folk string instrument