All Roads Lead to the Sea Read online

  Some nights, the only way to pass the time

  is to go down the hill,

  towards the town lights which are reflections of the stars

  reflected in the Harbour,

  and look for someone with a neatly cut silhouette

  in the thickness of night air or water,

  as if a neatly cut silhouette could give you

  anything more than its wandering destiny,

  than its shell lying at the bottom of the hill.

  As if anything could.

  But some nights we have to look for something.

  Windows: variations on Magritte

  Yesterday you stood at so many windows,

  at the back of the room, unable not to look,

  wistful, while in the background your life

  proved excessive endurance –

  that was its sterile way of reproducing.

  Today the windows were painted over

  (you did it in your sleep)

  and all you had today was a wall

  with so many windows painted on it.

  You looked anyway and you saw nothing

  this time, and you felt less restless;

  in the foreground your life sneered

  from its wheelchair – the triumph of the sick.

  Tomorrow I saw you in the window or was it

  your portrait on the wall?

  the sky of yesterday framing neatly

  today’s dream of an open window

  and everything beyond it.

  Poem without kites

  The ocean has nothing to tell you,

  its lethargic embrace holds the dead

  birds that always seem to appear

  on those unblinking skies of love.

  No kite tugs at your hand, the kite

  being a compulsory accessory

  of children and those in love.

  Flowers don’t open gracefully

  to spill their seeds in a symphony of light.

  There is no light. As of tonight

  the world’s metaphoric spell has lost its grip

  like an atrophied athlete’s muscle.

  And it’s a relief, or a small death,

  to be standing, dressed in the simplicity

  of night, for once not crumpled by ecstasy,

  anticipation or senseless joy.

  Silently, you greet the ocean, this pliant

  metaphor for anything we feel at a given time.

  As of tonight, you ascribe to it no meaning,

  no truth, no character. But planted firmly

  in its moving sands, your mere presence

  is a question: is it true that everything will pass

  before your dry eyes,

  even this night stripped of tomorrow?

  Icarus

  A light body with no head, I fly.

  I fall, a slow body incongruously tried

  to oversee the ocean.

  Falling follows flying, but what does flying follow?

  the dream, in which taking off is skyward falling?

  I always forget which is a state of mind,

  which is destiny. I forget which to forget

  so that the pain of it doesn’t happen,

  though hitting the sky is merely

  an ambition of pain.

  I forget, or worse – I never knew how to take

  the stretch of blue that beckons

  and doesn’t beckon, that breathes in and out,

  eternal with the ignorance of its tidal memory.

  How to be contained, and by what – this hidden

  vastness should cause at least a splash,

  at the moment of falling.

  But nothing does.

  One day I’ll wake up flying towards the green

  wall of the ocean, rehearsing in vertiginous circles

  the oceanic myth of me

  that sleeps without a splash

  beneath inconceivable vaults of silence

  and doesn’t know, and doesn’t need to know.

  Without the bottle

  You don’t suspect the extent

  of my miscalculations

  the banality

  so dreaded so unlike me

  of everything i’ve done

  you will be surprised to see me

  arriving gradually

  like mist on the water

  i’ve taken up smoking

  i’ve had fifteen

  lovers while i’ve been away

  and all along i was asleep

  in the hollow of my conscience

  thinking

  it won’t have happened

  upon waking …

  You smile and I was so

  shamefully right.

  Disbelievers by the sea

  We feel threatened by the thought of

  cheap lovers by the sea, in this cheap car,

  at this tacky hour of the night; like plucked,

  timid birds of prey, overlooking the town,

  in a moment of predatory crisis.

  Here, by the sea we hear but don’t see,

  and not necessarily because of its infinity,

  everything, even for us, becomes a finite subject

  for discussion. We’d like to fly or fall

  but we have neither wings nor a taste for standing

  on edges, we have only disbelief.

  We’ve agreed that excessive inhibition

  stems from excessive intellect, for which we don’t

  feel any better now. We have naturally denounced

  all forms of romance as an aesthetic disgrace.

  But listen: illegitimate fictions brew

  in our wise heads, our bodies so long, so secretly

  have looked for a desire, that we begin to suspect:

  disbelievers are perhaps the most savage,

  when they embrace, by mistake,

  disbelievers are crumbling sandcastles

  under the wash of darkness.

  Road nocturne

  A rainbow grows from the lake light with colours

  the road along the lake

  thrashes its tail trying to shake off

  the dead

  in the night they shine

  like shattered moons

  they appear silently naked

  stripped of skin and shame in the spotlight

  of the late driver who wakes up shivering

  a rainbow passes over them like a hand

  and crashes to the black earth

  heavy with transience

  Summer’s affirmative

  At five past twelve, the sun has reached its limit.

  The explosive brightness of colours can do nothing

  for the bleak eye that sees a fine crust of mud

  on the fresh skin of light, a residue of silence

  beneath the bubbling fury of a world.

  Why this shudder, suddenly, or worse – this spleen,

  passé and untimely, this winter of discontent

  in the middle of summer’s affirmative?

  But then why, on certain rainy nights,

  the sudden cosy comfort, verging on happiness

  when, like an old electrical appliance,

  you are disconnected from the world?

  Is it unbearably sad, or simply a trick of light,

  that the groomed, fine chiselled passer-by,

  intriguingly reflected in a window,

  has otherwise no grace and no reason to be;

  that the hunched horizon

  is our limit, always, and the sun –

  a deflated ball rolling back down, so slowly,

  so quickly,

  that even a replete present

  seeks obscure fictions?

  Insularity

  Each day, the house contains you.

  The shower cap contains your head.

  The plate contains your dinner.

  Outside is the terror of leaving,

  the vertigo of pavements,
>
  the inquisition of the sky,

  the footsteps of birds.

  Inside, the corners shelter you from the centre of rooms,

  the bare walls soothe you from the abrasion of carpets.

  Outside a fleet of clouds, like belated alternative lives,

  gathers in the Harbour apologetically.

  Inside throbs the single sleep of your single heart.

  And so it continues, each day in your house

  you move freely, diligently overcoming questions.

  But in your coat you wriggle like an inconsolable minotaur

  running through a labyrinth:

  while not looking for the way out,

  you never asked to be this way.

  Walking out of the party

  Nothing can explain this,

  the unbearable quality of such gestures:

  being in warm rooms,

  in the mellow phase of gregarious sharing,

  looking at photos of somebody’s

  impenetrable selves

  caught in an obscure past they’re too squeamish to stir,

  but keep looking,

  acting as if everything isn’t incidental,

  as if the night is an accomplice

  to these mild wine pleasures,

  as if the blooded dawn, and all

  children of horrific births, are subject to choice …

  There’s nothing to explain,

  but nothing

  can ease your fall from the edge of a doorstep,

  into that diffuse agony in which those

  who love you are happy to lose you,

  happy not to comprehend why

  you fall like a parachutist

  with no parachute, why not

  in a dream of flying,

  not out of weakness.

  Nothing, even the dumb

  speaking in literary conundrums,

  and the suicidal singing in a life-affirming chorus,

  can ease your fall – the breaking

  of that which has never been whole.

  The road at the end of town

  Tonight there is a road shining

  at the end of town, invitingly.

  But we let it run, we stay:

  the lonely,

  curled up in the vast dream

  of a phantom lover’s heat;

  the unsure, who lie beside

  a moonlit lover and clutch the cover

  and turn away;

  the calm, with a diminished heart-beat;

  the afraid, eclipsed by shadows in cluttered rooms;

  the broken, who can’t sleep, or stand, or carry on.

  We stay, anchored in this sea of lights.

  The road has left, and we are here

  for the morning,

  the morning when something returns,

  momentarily,

  without a name or beginning.

  Leaving the island

  Today, the ocean surrounds me.

  Every day the ocean surrounds me.

  But today, I hear myself say ‘I’m going to Europe’,

  I hear myself laugh with horror

  at the distance of that continent

  I am so unused to naming because I don’t name myself,

  because it sounds like greeting what’s always been here.

  I shake with disbelief at this voyage whose destination

  is its point of departure.

  Every land is an island.

  Everybody lives on an island.

  Except those who don’t know it,

  except those who don’t have to walk and sleep on tiptoe,

  not to wake the ever-vigilant ocean, who don’t know that

  leaving an island means to roll with the great,

  green ball of the ocean that calls itself

  in an endless lament, and never leaves,

  and never arrives.

  Copyright

  First published 1997

  This ebook edition 2012

  Auckland University Press

  Private Bag 92019

  Auckland

  New Zealand

  © Kapka Kassabova 1997

  This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the prior permission of Auckland University Press.

  eISBN 978 1 86940 528 1

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