All Roads Lead to the Sea Read online

  *little darling (Bulgarian)

  Father climbing to the stars

  In the strangest dream my father –

  a compressed, stubborn angel

  climbs the tree outside holding

  an obscure orange instrument

  in the strangest dream my father always

  falls interminably, like a curled leaf

  through the seasons of my life

  in slow motion (or is he just lighter

  than the rest?)

  When he hits ground, I am far away

  I have more white hair than he

  and when he hits ground I know

  I won’t wake up because

  in dreams you never hit ground

  (or is he, for once, breaking the rules?)

  Yes, and I wake up to see my father

  climbing the tree outside,

  severing the highest branches with

  an obscure orange instrument

  he won’t stop before the tree is just a trunk

  he’s making way for the light

  (I complain of sudden darkness)

  But now I complain the neighbours can see me

  through the bleeding gap of the tree

  and my father with the dead branches weaves

  a fence, protecting me from any gaze

  At night, when I sit by the window,

  bathed in a ray of haemophilic light,

  under a foreign sky,

  my father will be still

  climbing some stairway, my father

  will rearrange the stars

  in a pattern less dissonant to my eyes.

  Going home

  I like to play outside.

  I like to juggle with rotten apples

  and teach dead birds to fly,

  watch the neighbours’ cats mate

  violently, as if for the last time,

  hear the hedgehogs sigh

  with human voices.

  I like to play outside all night,

  safe, because all the windows are closed

  and the keys turned in the locks.

  I like to play because then

  I can go home in the morning.

  In the winter

  The fifth season of Dunedin

  the sky is a marble tomb

  descending on this town

  casting angular shadows

  across these faces where

  the illusion of summer

  has lasted too long where

  the discontent of another,

  stranger season remembers itself

  and the only memory is that of making

  the bed in the morning

  undoing the bed at night

  and watching a sunspot move

  imperceptibly on the edge

  of the round kitchen table, never

  in the middle in the middle

  was the ocean harder than stone

  or darker than any sky

  These days are the sleeping

  faces of winter smooth

  like frozen lakes

  we swim underneath almost visible

  through the ice

  our hands are bloodless, our feet

  cold stone are pulling us under

  every time we forget not to look

  through the roof of these days

  a sun is almost visible

  and we wait as we always wait

  every winter

  for the snowchildren

  to wave from sun swings

  and disappear.

  In the winter

  1

  In the winter

  I stripped your skin,

  it was so white I thought

  I did it for love and yes

  I did, I gave you a new one, better.

  I gave you lessons. I taught you

  how to be normal, how to be like me,

  I really loved you.

  You listened and you took

  everything I gave you, you really loved me.

  But one day I saw you standing

  on the other side of so many

  frosty roads, you were wearing

  your old skin inside out,

  you were entering another summer, elsewhere.

  2

  I was the worst person to disappoint

  but you were betrayed by your body.

  Having had a snow-fight over

  the role of winter in the withering

  of the heart and the body,

  having wanted to live and not remember

  but secretly remembering

  and only pretending to live,

  having never been rich or famous

  but never lost our excessive

  attachment to objects we couldn’t have,

  there was still much to do and say

  but we were far too sophisticated,

  the temperature was falling,

  and though you were the worst person

  to let down, I was betrayed by my mind.

  Pine Hill or elsewhere

  This house looks no different from the others

  but it’s the last house on this last hill.

  There was a sense of unease in us

  for a long time, as we climbed this hill

  as the sky grew bigger and windier

  there was a sense of ending.

  Now we know, it’s because

  this is the end of the world

  and this is the last house on the last hill

  before the sky begins.

  The sky begins from the back door, the wind

  begins a little further, and the fog

  and the snow and the dream of elsewhere though

  we know there’s no such place.

  Some days the sky moves in

  and out of the door in and out,

  the dogs bark

  the electricity crackles

  the TV screen has been

  painted over for twenty years now

  in other words, the house is ready to take off.

  But soon the more ordinary days follow

  and we wake up on the same day again

  and begin to paint.

  We are the last and best painters

  of dead clouds going elsewhere.

  Storm

  I see your face as you run from me,

  as I leave you, I take root in you

  So we go down the hill under

  the fine stonework of the sky

  broken by trickles of light

  We go down crying the names

  of places where we wouldn’t want to be

  because they are too much like here

  The world, in the end, is too small

  to hide each other and

  ourselves

  We are lost in the many

  Sundays to follow, emptied by wind

  and filled with stones fallen from the sky

  Some day you’ll be the only face

  I’ll recognise in the foreign

  landscapes of my life

  I’ll be the only one to see you

  running from the storm

  on the edge of lightning

  Sick of the sea

  In the winter of our discontent

  the sea was cold

  and in the summer of our despair – also.

  We are sick of seeing the sea

  of hearing the sea

  of tasting it

  of licking our wounds

  metallic and salty.

  But for those without faith

  there is no other season

  there is only the sea

  cold throughout the year

  carrying unwanted Sundays

  like sea-birds travelling

  on slow waves

  towards the wet beaches

  of our palms where nothing grows

  where we draw with sticks

  our long names

  and small hearts

  where everything


  including the sea-birds

  is neatly washed out

  on the next day.

  Summary

  1 some nameless fruit crashes

  to the ground where I pass every day on my way to school

  asking the deaf woman’s pet ‘what day is it?’

  the pet’s paws and my hands

  are covered in seeds and fruit blood

  (I walk upside down, hoping

  to induce the same inverse

  motion in time)

  2 ‘mother, the mirror surprises you every day

  just as it surprised your mother’

  says my daughter implying that

  life beyond forty is a shameful secret

  which shouldn’t be passed on

  (my daughter who wears

  two watches, to make sure

  time doesn’t slip by

  my daughter whose belly grows)

  3 a soft stone that never touches bottom

  a presence that swells, the more I try

  to name it, a voice that isn’t mine but me

  a lake bottom, a fish, a splash

  (that’s how I sleep,

  respected and forgotten,

  certain that nothing

  will be left of me)

  Snow

  We wake up and nothing weighs less than snow;

  the curtains betray its light.

  Snow conceals a smell the freezing works of time

  would have if we dwelled on it all day. That’s why

  we are afraid to open the curtains;

  snow isn’t always the opposite of mourning –

  the blackbird swings on a branch, knowingly.

  Snow appears only in the morning

  but while we slept, it weighed on our sleep.

  Who knows how long we slept?

  Absent-mindedly

  Absent-mindedly, you stand against the sky

  this frozen mess of water

  is not the colour of your eyes today

  is where i won’t find you when you die

  is where you’ll never go

  where are you, except before me

  here and now, who are you except your name

  and why do i forget that i

  probably love you (though who is it i love?)

  you wear a T-shirt of clouds today

  as you always do on a tuesday

  (though it’s wednesday – why do you always forget?)

  you have shaven half your face again

  it shines through the obscurity of life like

  fake gold,

  the other half forgotten, turned away

  i speak of you as if you’re

  terminally ill (are you?)

  i think of you in the second person, as if

  you can hear me

  i see you deftly eluding me

  ducking under the rainbow

  i painted carefully around you

  in the end, when i forget everything, I want

  to watch the sky, this frozen mess of water

  drip through your eyes like an answer

  Natural phenomena

  The wind, the snow

  these natural phenomena,

  find me prickly with doubt like a sick cactus

  in this badly insulated house

  and I ask the melancholic

  snowmen dancing around the house,

  all looking like somebody I must’ve known once:

  how can I not hear the doors flapping

  like the broken arms of someone

  with a fantasy of flying? (excuse the anthropocentric

  comparison, I say to them)

  yes, it’s natural and even Spartan

  not to have many visitors walk through the doors

  in this weather: they don’t because

  a heap of snow remains in the doorway,

  memory’s body, even whiter than your faces

  remains, for what can we do, struck and surrounded

  by Nature, faceless like countless tiny enemies,

  except refuse to thaw?

  The wind, the snow, these natural phenomena,

  will leave me one day, and so will the snowdancers

  who resemble someone less and less

  while retaining their melancholy.

  One day even the winter will expire

  in a pool of unnatural thoughts.

  Territory of doubt

  I have a fantasy: it’s the wildest I have, the only one.

  It only goes beyond the freshly elapsed moment:

  it’s to believe that what I see is all there is

  that while I’m outside, the phone can’t ring

  while the sun irradiates my wakeful skin

  nobody anywhere sleeps in a darkness so complete

  it can’t exist without swallowing the sleeper,

  so complete that while I sleep, nothing

  can be undreamt.

  That my spring can’t be anybody’s winter

  my dinner anybody’s suicide, but above all

  that the opposite is true – how can anyone take a highway

  of palm-trees and suns, when it’s raining down here,

  and the car is broken?

  I spend my days not knowing how to ask with dignity:

  please, someone tell me that all there is

  is what I see

  (and not what I glimpse, suspect or hear lurking

  in the unspeakable elsewhere)

  someone tell me that between two blinks, two heartbeats,

  the devil and the deep blue sea,

  between the irreparable clichés

  of sunrise and sunset,

  in that territory of doubt, there’s nothing more

  and nothing less

  than a windowful of easy sky.

  All roads lead to the sea

  Envy

  I envy you.

  Your restlessness,

  patient and curable,

  will take you anywhere

  and back.

  Meanwhile, having seen

  the beginning of the world

  and the end of my curiosity

  having wanted

  to be everywhere at once

  I remain frozen

  in my special look

  of premature wisdom

  drinking cups of rainwater

  from a discontented sky.

  Daywalking to the sea

  This is a déjà-vu:

  a late afternoon,

  under a dusk-driven sky,

  promising yet another darkness

  deeper and more lasting than any

  house-fire can dispel.

  Why shiver and change shape, imitating

  a cloud on the verge of electrical execution?

  these spaces of no-tomorrow are uncrossable.

  We remain in the hour of no-release. The sky

  faking a calm before the storm is only calm

  and once again means nothing.

  This is a déjà-vu: five o’clock, an hour of trying

  to retrieve a memory from cold-lit windows,

  a memory of things which could’ve never been real,

  otherwise we wouldn’t be here,

  otherwise descending in these hanging gardens

  of darkness would be a wonder, not

  the nightmare of a daywalker …

  Why do we seek to merge with the last sound of rage

  that swells as we get closer? we know that when we reach

  the bottom of the hill, the sea always disappears.

  The road to Roxburgh

  All roads lead to the sea, says the driver

  and then talks to a passenger about

  living in Roxburgh,

  about the weather, taxes and his teenage

  daughter who studies home science

  and has a boyfriend mechanic.

  Meanwhile the bus cuts through

  landscapes frozen in the wind

  they are th
e memories of buses cutting

  through the lonely landscapes of the mind

  in some other country in some

  other life with someone else

  sitting in the next seat

  someone who had the same

  graceful abandon while sleeping,

  through empty towns called Roxburgh –

  all turned to the sea and seeing

  nothing but themselves,

  through vast, imperceptible reflections

  of the sky and shadows broken against the hills

  through the same wind whistling false

  memories laughing at our lost faces saying

  in the driver’s voice

  All roads lead to the sea.

  A river runs through my head, willows grow out of my ears. I know that the pleasure of loneliness doesn’t last.

  Virginia Zakharieva, from ‘A late afternoon quadrille’

  There are nights when every book is a tombstone

  that doesn’t open and doesn’t close, and contains no

  valid secrets. Alive in this cemetery,

  you have no alternative lives, nor can you prove

  that you have a life of your own.

  The town has a pulse, somewhere, you know no one in town,

  or perhaps they don’t know you.

  There is nature, surrounding the town, but you

  have no affinity with ‘nature’ – she is serene

  around your fretful body.

  Everything just is

  and nothing is enough on these nights

  so much like all other nights:

  inside the closed tombs you gaze at skeletons

  of truths you understand but cannot use.