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,
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,
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
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