Notes from Book of Faces, Page 2

Regular and soft clicks had been falling into rapid rustle on the background of an even and light buzz, when sudden blackout stopped the cassette on rewound, covered fully written sheets on a desk and, swapping the street and room, off-whitened the two black squares. Tree silhouettes, sky pieces and black squares of the kind in a building in front - drew themselves with rapid smoothness. A light stripe, pierced, jumped from branch to branch, then, followed by its pale twin,  slid down the wall,  pricked the clock, and disappeared in the darkest corner a bit before an engine noise died in the hidden road perspective; the glass picture was again natural and motionless. Regular and soft clicks were falling into the emptiness, dividing it into seconds.

  Rhythmical rumble, whose strength couldn’t be hidden by the thick ground on, shook the walls, windows and twice invisible crystal in the dresser.

  Light brought back the furniture, chandelier and cassette buzz; a piece of time had been cut off, and the tape ends were glued together. The sky pieces outside flashed and disappeared behind green wallpaper, or rather its glass twin with the blackness coming through.

  Two voices are coming through the door from the staircase.

  GAPS

  Standing still, black wooden zigzag reaches down in a steep manner. Iron rods grow up from the wooden body and pierce stone put under. The stairway follows the zigzag, step after step, taking pauses on the square turns.  A fragment of black-and-white tiled floor in the frame cancels the handrails running and doesn’t let them contract into a grey dot in an invisible perspective. The three walls grow up by the stairway and join as the white ceiling. A short and silent ring has come from behind, and so has the even sound of doors moving apart.

  The lit yellow circle jumps from number to number; the short and silent ring; the even sound of the door halves moving apart. People enter as if commanded, with the awkward synchronism of extras hired for a crowd scene. Leaving behind pieces of walls, handrails, dustbins, plants in pots and bodies in clothes, the halves of the mechanical curtain come together to change the scene in few seconds. The walls and handrails are still the same while bins and pots change their positions or just disappear; the stage depth starts seeming just a 3D-picture, and next crowd actors appear coming right from the screen and turning the lift into another film-shooting place. The door is closed again, and memory wastes time trying to join the things and keep them together. They take turns falling into the dark, and the left ones, excessively bright, make it even darker.

  P. S. There is a tree crown behind the window, in the middle of a white wall. Golden foliage tremble discloses a weak wind and a sunset. The wooden window cross divides the foliage into four unequal parts.

  SMOKE ON THE WATER

  Yesterday, fog was strangely white in the dark, and in the morning, port cranes at the horizon appeared the shadows of those piercing the emptiness some closer to me.  It looked like a crowd of pre-historical monsters, coming out of smoky scarlet non-existence.

  MYTHOLOGY

  Two old houses in the low place, putting out the iron shields of their roofs, hide the street between. The nearest one is one floor shorter; the windows are curtained, and the brick wall is reddish in the bright street lights. A visible echo of the wind, tree shadows look like gigantic hands keeping swords. The fight is hidden.

  HOME VIDEO

  The rug’s got convex, an endless field cut to the screen. A camera lens can’t watch askance.

  NOT TO ME

  A white-capped head is over you, having left the light and a ceiling fragment in another world.

  -The nerve must be removed.

  WIND

  The foliage from behind the roof is like a sinking one’s hands.

  THE HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN

  Dimming as many tiny dark dents, the steel-grey surface sometimes blows up a white stream, no local skyscraper has grown as high as. If negative, it looks like oil, backed by suddenly pale hills. Yachts’ sails also get black. However, the coming sun burns the blackness, and the fountain starts resembling an equalizer while triangular stains, animated by a wind blow, are moving as ghosts from a thriller screen-written by Pythagoras.

  The over-exposed sky carries edge-burnt clouds in the same direction.

  The blue shining surface is soaring as hundreds of invisible water towers.

  BEHIND URBAN NOISE

  Far and close, the sky triangle is clearly cut by poplar crowns with deceitful cloud 3D inside; the air is green and fresh.

  BOULEVARD

  It’s early twilight. A pale-blue monkey on the bench seems a bit drunk. It’s little again that the photographer has earned: cheese-smiling walkers are standing for their own snapshot cameras. Dolphin-show waves splash up against the pier. Summer-evening music is soft-echoed.

  A rare case of an irreplaceable truism, buildings and trees are diving into the dark, their colours getting denser and denser.

  COLOURMUSIC OF SUBLUNARY SEA

  is silent.

  END OF NIGHT

  It’s getting light.

  IT’S GETTING LIGHT

  It’s getting light.

  NIGHT TRAFFIC LIGHTS

  It’s graphics of branches; the trunk is bloody red and deep black wrinkled.

  BREEZE

  It’s sunny; trembling light and shadow in the foliage play green hues; soft clouds are featherbeds for feathered angels.

  ÉTUDE

  The street is full of facades and faces: pieces of talks seem making up a modernist symphony, or is it just an orchestra tuning?

  ZOOM-IN, ZOOM-OUT, AND EVEN CLOSER

  It’s a red curtain; it’s a red transparent curtain; it’s a red transparent curtain with a stain; a sparrow’s landed on a bench.

  Flown away; the red transparent curtain with a stain; the red transparent curtain; the red curtain; a wall clock to the left from the room entrance.

  OPTICS

  The hills on a side of the bay and a factory across - this still picture suddenly decomposed as the sea, hills and factory, seemingly reachable by hand - and the all came together again, and went apart, and came together, andwentapartandcametogetherandwent. . . .

  STOPPING BY AN OLD YARD

  Framed by a stone semicircle of the entrance, there is bit of sunny optimism over ivy over windows over somebody’s life  watching all the changes from the past point of view, cut into this half-round. Yet the old car can take away by the garbage cans into the crowd of floors rising.

  POETRY EVENING

  Three or four upholstered steps quietly lead through an invisible wall. Blinking in red, the hall goes upstairs to crest as the balcony.

  A look at oneself is split into hundreds from there and proves nothing. People thrown onto the stage only feel each other and listen to the boom behind the spotlights.

  That’s why the sudden occasional rustle of pages sounds so strangely soft behind.

  Black on white, rows of signs are blindly facing each other in the deaf dark, soon to be disclosed.

  BIG CITY’S LIGHTS, OR PASTEL NIGHT

  The moon is smiling black, accompanied by red-circled light holes, hundreds of lights, thrown across this milky-white field, hiding the dark.

  DIMENSIONS

  Clouds are again white, light and inaccessible, but wires over the street are still sagging after the load of yesterday’s.

  DEEPLY BELOW

  Pieces of foliage and asphalt are puzzle-fit to each other.

  WILL SAVE THE WORLD

  Motionless in the sky, they sway, crowning plastic sticks in hawkers’ hands. Dimming phosphorus waves of many toy stars have crowded a piece of the dark.

  OF THINGS

  Pale-blue oilcloth hills have distorted squares with eight-petal flowers.

  A dark-blue pen cap, tablespoon with fat drops,  empty sugar can, green cup, metal teapot, and a red deodorant have added some occasional and temporary shades to the neat picture.

  The cap shows the entering piece of its black tunnel. The spoon bridge discloses the underneath. White powder has stu
ck to the glass within the limited atmosphere, its sky screwed tight. The can shadow climbs down into an invisible abyss and up by a fully steep side: the table isn’t touching the wall.

  A couple of round holes and a screw in the middle: a socket. The bottom and top of the cup have painted crimson the combination of the two circles. A tea petal is wrinkled on the pot spout, watching the corner. The corner climbs up as a run-down stripe to expand on the ceiling. The slow yellow wave, descending to touch the pale-blue squares, hides the cold, windy, black and abyss-like window rectangle.

  Keeping a pen, my hand comes from the non-existence in slow jerky moves within the red shining cylinder, touches one-and-half letters of an English word and, rising somewhere, disappears almost momentarily. The white, convex-curved cone of the paper sheet climbs under the blind plastic of the high cap.

  The oil-cloth hills hide old childish pictures on the uneven wood. If hand-pressed, other parts will rise.

  RAPID SUNSET

  Fire has flown across windows on that side of the bay.

  BEFORE

  Step after step, the pier has led me into strange marine silence, backed by urban noise, into a mise-an-scene of three kissing couples, suddenly showing behind the rusty remains of a cafe.

  Coming back has again cut the bay’s half-sphere through. Wind has turned the fountain fan towards the shore and woven a rippled TV tower from vertical water threads, whose slow and measured motions resemble screen interference, a sudden development of the theme. Pushed forward by my steps, the tower has come out from behind the water. The silhouette is blurred and softened by the sunshine.  Gloomily clear shapes and colours of buildings are to the right,  a fragile and brief whim of the cloudy sunset.

  RESORT. NIGHT

  The black abyss is the booming sea. A dead light is off-white.

  A double yellow light with a low engine sound has slid over a hovering row of black windows and caught a piece of a blind wall with a red garbage can and a green bench. Some later, something will knock and give out a long squeak in an invisible perspective.

  Somebody has forgotten a towel on the green bench. A window must have been opened - a piece of talk as a short chord - and closed again somewhere. It’s silence again.

  No glass in the windows, two unfinished cottages blindly face each other.

  LIGHTS ON THAT SIDE OF THE BAY

  Long thin legs shake glossy, both gliding on the surface and sinking into the dark emptiness, unexplainable simultaneity.

  LIKE A WATERFALL

  The foliage appears descending from the sky as a shining waterfall, but the sun fails hiding the role of flora in the gentle tremble created. The modest support of the show, the trunk does its best to keep the crown in focus for the low-pixel cell-phone camera.

  Dust, dirt and scaffold are behind me.

  UNDERGROUND THEATER

  A swing is hanging down from the ceiling centre. Right under, a tank-top boy is climbing up out of a thick rug. A naked woman in a far corner is sitting on her legs in front of a mirror. The swing is shaking. In another corner, a man with an alabaster cry on his alabaster face is breaking out of a boa’s hug.

  Three live women are fast walking from corner to corner, now speaking loudly and nervously, and now keeping mum. The watchers are following on the squeaky parquet.

  Some after everyone’s gone, the swing finally stops. Moved by an occasional weak kick, the shoulders, head, and strangely happy smile from an unknown light material are still reaching up with the same frozen stubbornness.

  IN

  Lack of daylight makes night time the only reality, and the difference between is a dying habit of the recent past.

  Colours of the imagined day are static; darkness conceals the white cloth of the low sky getting rugged.

  MORNING

  The mirror changes its facial expression in momentary jester mimic: stretching lips in the same smile as frowning, wrinkling and mine. The mirror keeps the wrinkles as the last variant when only an empty peg and a fragment of the entry door are in front of it.

  SOMETHING ABOUT SUMMER

  All’s become a bit older for the few seconds between the two pictures: the tree, wine in the glasses, musicians, Summer Time, me, and even you. Times fail branch-weaving and disappear into each other through the edges cut.

  FATE OR IRONY, OR ALMOST FORTY

  Drops are falling onto the parquet. A meeting has taken place between. The wooden back is showing from behind the terry red-and-white-and-blue. Steam is rising over an empty glass. A new lot of subway cars has been delivered to.

  A yellow-and-green curtain is covering another gloomy morning. A steamy mirror is hardly mimicking  a piece of screen and a car key on a shelf. A little pool on the tiled floor. Between seventeen countries’ delegates. The terry white-and-blue pile has fully hidden the red plastic circle. The wet flap is angle-down. Steam is rising over an half-empty cup. And will soon start running on the lines. A name on the window must have been left by a left-hand point-finger. An umbrella case.

  Thirty-nine meters and forty two centimetres between dry marble and wet asphalt muffle the rattle of trains and rustle of tires.

  WRITER’S COPIES

  One hundred and ninety glossy rectangles are watching the ceiling with the same look of the same black eyes from a thick rug fully covered. The parquet is marching under, in the emotionless dark.  The mosaic is gradually losing its homogeneity, proving more and more different in the looks and smiles. The rug is laughing as almost two hundred laughers, tearing it into almost two hundred pieces; splits are running through the hidden ceiling mirror.

  Six thousand and ten copies are watching the same number of strange ceilings.  The polished surface of coffee-tables preserves their immaculate paper smoothness, yet even an occasional facedown fall into a rug ornament doesn’t change the look and smile.

  The glossy rectangle has been recovered on its proper coffee-table position; one’s slippery steps sound sleepy behind the wall, but the close-up face is still looking somewhere up, away from the invisible camera, and still ignoring the night beyond, and still living on that guillotined sunny day.

  Seven thousand quasi-copies.

  UNAVOIDABLE QUESTION

  Keys stick to my fingers spelling the left. The cursor pulls the Ariadne thread, often dives into the screen, to the hungry guests, and comes back to the kitchen to check the cake for the right time to cream-paint these sweet words, THE END.

  Thank you for reading this book. If you have questions or comments, feel free to contact me ([email protected]).