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
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
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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