Bill's stuff

Approaches to Sofia

So much plaster has fallen from her walls
she feels like lokum or an unpeeled lychee
with its stalk still attached but not to a bush.
Down the side of an apartment block
in yellow visiting letters it says SOFCOM.

Sitting on a stump with her black-clad back
to Vassil Levski Stadium, the art student sketches
a giant upheld submachine gun rising from
beyond the booths and bare trees. The city smells
of rain, both as it is anticipated, and as it falls.

The light switches in the agency hostel are round
like discoloured eyeballs in black sockets.
Old gloss drips across the eyes of disenchanted
journalists. Click them and they sound like big fat drops
on big fat roses, only the drops sound cold.

The Largo’s yellow bricks taste of a dust
that you suspect of being worn-out turmeric.
The space where Zhivkov’s tomb used to be
looks like the bristly disconnected jaw
of Desperate Dan, like a colossal chin.




Lokum—a gelatinous confection, variously flavoured and coloured, and coated with powdered sugar.



*



A Small Tune

The man honking enthusiastically on the creamy grey sac of skin in Eldon Square, the day before I left for Sofia – the man in the woolly hat who seemed to have a tune he was searching for without ever really being able to find it; the man everyone seemed to avoid, especially small dogs the same colour as the bag of skin – nonetheless seemed to have a small fortune lying in the coat spread out on the pavement before him.

It must be a small tune, to have so few notes in it – half a melody whistled by someone a century back as they performed a small domestic task. Not that hamstring-straining walk back up the mountain in the moonlight, back through the patchy snow, up through his breath to the farmhouse. He was silent for that, listening to the dog making difficult work of the drifts with its short legs. Not that tune full of the things he hadn’t told her in the gloom of her parents’ gate – he never wrote that down. But a small tune for the task of fetching a wooden cup, cracking the dull mirror of ice and dipping in the barrel, a few notes interrupted by the search to separate his face from the moon as the water settled.

I’m walking across a park in Sofia. It’s lunchtime and there are dogs asleep on the grass in the March sunlight. Even the sign hanging half off a bare-branched tree looks sleepy. I’m listening to another bagpipe player who’s sitting on a bench behind me and I’m looking at this huge sculpture like a gantry with tiles dropping off it, commemorating in wings and girders and cloud-gazing figures some event I can’t read. It’s surrounded by the most livid graffiti I can’t read either, and as I walk round it, the tune on the bagpipe is drowned out by music from the cafe in the corner of the park. This music too is being piped in from somewhere else.

*

Ghost Guests

At the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency we must not disturb
the ghosts of former journalists
who once reported on events
they had not attended, on news
that had not happened, and quoted all the dignitaries
who had not actually spoken.

These ghost guests, who do not sleep above us,
must never be woken by the improvisations
of artists from our two cities
apparently taking place right now,
not even by our clicking Esperanto na billiardski
while they do not watch Juventus.

The staff’s large dogs, which either protect us
from wolves, mafia, owl-shaped assassins, or
prevent us from leaving, lie around all day
while we, guests of a genus
unable to shower or buy Zagorka beer, falteringly
advance the dialogue of nations.



*



Rotunda of Sveti Georgi

Step down through all the fierce compacting years
into Serdica, the earliest city. It’s like
getting on your knees. Get on your knees
in that sobriety of grandmas and look up –

until the thin bricks swill like noodles round
the red inverted bowl of the Pantocrator,
and the fresco layers separate like cream,
each one partly revealed, partly destroyed.

Bulgarian angels stoop round its rim
and peer out from under Byzantine saints
like the men who squat to buy brandy
through low windows along the side streets.

This is how the holy have always got drunk –
heads mingled, immersed to their waists in feathers.


*



Victory Lights

My father threw the cigarette packet down the steep green slope of the cliff, and I watched it flutter down to where the red rock drop began.

‘Fetch,’ he commanded, but casually, as though he didn’t really mind whether he saw the packet again or not.I stared after it as it tumbled slowly from rock to rock, the breeze delaying its descent. I had good eyesight in those days and could easily read what it said:

‘Victory Lights. Cigarettes can make you feel a bit unwell or dead.’ I hadn’t noticed that the packets carried warnings before.

I tumbled down the slope, my father muttering, ‘Fetch, fetch,’ like a general ordering his dogs after a bear, but the bear is lost in the trees, its pelt an orangey red that matches the tree-bark, and you can only occasionally catch the white glint of the sunlight reflected in its eyes.

Perhaps it’s a former dancing bear, I thought, as my legs continued pumping. Perhaps it’s remembering the steps of a former dance.

I was almost horizontal now, facing the sea as it broke into white seagulls before me, but none of them had ‘Victory Lights’ written on their wings or backs. I remained so focussed I didn’t realise my shoulders had sprouted wings made out of the thinnest cigarette papers gummed together across a frame of used matchsticks made for me by a dead uncle, so I swooped down on the packet and caught it in one fierce hand before it could touch the waves, and brought it back to my father.

He looked at it a little warily and said, ‘No, I’m giving up.’

*

Red Lullaby
(for Andy Croft)

Hush little baby, don’t feel worse,
Momma’s going to buy you a talking horse,
a talking horse that wants to fly
and never tells a single lie.
The horse’s mane is blow-torch white
to keep your crib aflame by night,
the horse’s saddle strawberry red
to match the eyelids on your head,
the horse’s hooves are made of steel
to keep your bedroom cold and real.
And if this truthful horse won’t fly,
we’ll bake its guts in humble pie;
and if this talking beast won’t speak,we’ll dine on steak for half a week.


*



Gara Thompson

Somebody must have beat Prokopnik up
as badly as Frank Thompson and his troop
of doomed guerillas, left it face down in
the coal dust filling in its mirthless grin
of disused huts and shovellers, though the church
looked new, red-tiled beneath that tall bright ridge
of mountains showing snow through thinning birch.
We bounced across a long thin hopeful bridge
and saw the river and the railway track
entwining as they left, and then the plaque
for Gara Thompson: Communism’s small
tribute upon an empty station’s wall.
What did he leave? A crossless monument
that hoped to know the future’s whole intent.

Then drove around those high containing hills:
limestone that seemed to wall in brief towns called
Sverino still, or ‘beastly’ in his slang,
because the Turks were ambushed there, and hanged
the rebels where they caught them; shrines where monks
found mimic etymologies for all
this rock, since Cherepishki can mean ‘skull’
and ‘little prick’ – as was the fascist drunk
at Litakovo who was told to shoot
Frank with his weekly batches of haidutsi
because he was and could be seen to be a
pratenikia of solidarity.
He left a copy of Catullus, since
we cannot worship where we do not wince.

And so we drove into Lyuti Dol,
the ‘hot ferocious valley’ circled by all
those mountains, followed lumps of snow still lining
the road as through dropped from their truck, and then in
each village saw what seemed to be great torches
of unlit straw in metal baskets topping
telegraph poles: nests for still-absent storks
to bring good fortune back. Till then a slip
of red and white thread’s worn through March, for luck
that he ran out of here, a wristbone crossed
with blood, a martinitsa – string you pluck
to hear how Spring’s vibrating with the lost.
What did he leave? That faith of youth
which struggles for yet never doubts the truth.

And in another bashed-up town, the lane
that bears his name led past a breekless bairn
and up towards the unkempt bottled steps
and rambled gravel where the past is kept, a
bratska mogila by some hilltop firs,
the ‘brothers’ grave’ for partisans who now
are held remote and nameless as dead stars,
regime fall tarnishing his martyr’s crown.
And yet the silence reached that valley’s shroud
of snowcaps, till we hit the Sofia road
and passed those girls who bare their bums and bras,
since what he couldn’t see has come to pass.
He left a thumb-smear coin, since heads or tails
we always know Byzantium must fall.


Haidutsi—brigands, rebels; pratenikia—messenger, emissary; martinitsa—red and white thread worn on the wrist throughout March.


*



Svetka Petka Samardzhiiska

It’s night-time now in the elder frescos
and the saints have faithfully held their poses
while darkness clusters like granular slush.

They’ve been torn up, scrumpled, and mostly
lost their places in the comic book
that’s plastered in tatters to this strip-brick vault
by the blast of hours passing by default,
until we see their heads tilted in that gloom,
gospels like flails, their features shining
like insects
­and suddenly the entire
squat chapel is the inside of the Bible beetle:
I sit in its camphor belly and stare
at what must be the negatives of its real
markings, since its back could never be
open to those snow-plugged clouds above
Sofia, half-buried in the underpass
among the glassy shops of boklutsi.

Its wingcases are opening in Heaven
with all these panels fully restored:
the saints blink once in that morning
and the bug unfurls its wings,
scaled with all their naked haloes.


Boklutsi—cheap souvenirs, tat.

*

Music in a Hotel Room

Closing the curtains sounds like tearing the day up.
You look for a language on the TV
you nearly understand,
but give up on game shows.

Room service always makes the bread look sad.
The partly-rehydrated porcini mushroom
dents your only gold filling
and you can’t drink beer in bed.

You listen to Gesualdo on your laptop and for him
it’s still the darkness of Good Friday.
Later, while the snow falls
on the muddy courtyard’s tracks,

you dream about the knife of light
laid on the chill of a church nave,
the dog tongue piazza outside,
and wonder how the knife feels about you,

how the knife feels about your vocal chords?
You open the curtains, and split
the darkness into dawn.
Snow clings to the rooftiles’ tips.


*

Mirror Writing

I must remember never to talk to myself in the mirror. When I do this something always goes wrong. Pep talks are particularly disastrous. I think this is because I’m not addressing me, I’m addressing my reflection. He gets tremendously confident, and goes about in the mirror world solving social problems.

Because we are joined by the thin wire of our eyesight, all this activity has a negative effect on my world and things go excruciatingly wrong. Like that remark about my nostril hairs.

There’s also the fact that he doesn’t like me. Whenever I catch sight of him in a shop window or the chrome panel of a lift he scowls at me and tries to throw me. By talking to him I’ve revealed too much of my inner world and he hates all those squishy hopes.

Because he knows my plans, he’s always there ahead of me, souring the ground, like that time I turned up at my favourite bar and Dorothy told me I was barred.

‘Why, what did I do?’

‘You know fine what you were up to last night.’

‘But I was in Edinburgh last night.’

I have the same problem with TV programmes. If I watch a football match, the team I support always loses. This is because they hear me shouting and are put off or offended. In the mirror world praise is always condemnation, and softness is always an offensive vulgarity.

I’ve just realised this is what’s wrong with my pep talks. If I’d just abuse my reflection all would go well.

I knew all this when I was a child. My grandmother’s bathroom was lined with black tiles so I could see myself going to the toilet. This meant all the reflections of all the girls at my school could see me going to the toilet too. I would sit down and never say a word.

I was much wiser then, calmer and more sensible.


*


Sofia City Blues

Eh am like thi toon whaur Eh wiz born,
meh hert is always somewhere whaur it disnae belong;
the demons of thi ages rip ma heid tae rags
and Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags,
Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags.

do you confuse great pop music
with being in love
well, don’t apologise

Eh’m thi less travelled, unravelled man
jist a-waitin fur a slogan in thi New Bedlam
Eh’m thi man ootwith thi language, wi thi slanguage fuhl o baggage
and Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags,
Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags.

do you peel your mind and find
city within city within city?
don’t make a career out of it

They tell me stoap translatin and enjoy thi kitsch
beginning wi thi wife o Doktor Lachnavitch
but anither ladybird jist appeared oan ma pad
she sez Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags,
Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags.

the bed is sandy
the bed is Sunday
the bed is bad lasagne

tissue remains



*



Tissue Remains

Too many hands were pressing on
my breastbone and my brow in
the great marble sandwich of the state museum.
We slid like sliced meat about the Thracian room
filled with so much gold as though
Midas had beaten up a rose garden
into this dinner service full of slurring rhyta.
The bas-relief horsemen insisted
on cornering their boars with always
one hand flung out behind them
not clutching a spear but letting the reins stream
through their casually tugging long fingers
which would only take a millennium
to rearrange themselves into
the next door icons’ serpentine blessing machines
of still more hands. But for now
all the faces were Alexander clones
so that was never where my eyes could rest
till the skull-bulb helmets drew us,
their tight-lipped spaces that hold
exact absences, to the case in which
earth-coloured armour propped on perspex shoulders
and shinbones. And the greaves,
that word that’s almost a wound,
had their own card that told us
what survives the centuries’ ceaseless fingers
is less than the step I couldn’t take away:
‘Bronze, traces of leather straps, tissue remains.’




Rhyta (plural of rhyton) – drinking cups with a hole in the point to drink from.



*


Application for the Post of a Passing Bird

Is reading better than just living?

Is writing better than just reading?

Is translating better than just writing?

Is teaching foreign literature better than just translating it?

Is it better to teach the foreign literature of a previous era than contemporary foreign literature?

Is it better not to teach the foreign literature of a previous era, just to sit alone in your unclear flat, contemplating the writers of that time in the turmoil of their distant city?

Is it better to imagine yourself still in your own city, but at that previous time, far away from the writers of that foreign literature, each facing the murderous dilemma of their lives, and just think about how impossible it would be to translate them?

Is it better to stay in the goose-eyed village where you were born, but at that distant time and not to know the language of those foreign writers, filled with the outrageous energy of despair, working away at the great works you will never read?

Is it better to stay in your unclean room in your father’s house, and imagine a language which will enable you to talk to the girl who sells your mother adulterated bread in the shop you are afraid to go in?

Is it better to write a blotchy book in this language and send it to the executed writers in their far away graves for them to translate?

Or is it better just to translate it yourself into all the languages of the dead?

(As you ponder this last question, a nondescript bird appears briefly at thewindow.

Is it better to be this bird?)


*



The Bear

We’re not long out of the blue bare dome
of the Banya Bashi mosque, empty except
for some bloke from Luton, when
we meet the bear. Everything had seemed
so familiar till the look on its face.

The Roma on the other end of the chain
plays that little fiddle that stares you down
like the Cretan lyre, and the great bear lifts
one paw as though to rest it on the skull
of one of these someones constantly

passing, each far more naked in
their negligent gaze as one foot shifts
to the beat, and I find I’m staring at
the jaunty red scarf instead of the strap
around its jaws. This bear has

another pattern to obey,
the way the painters in Boyana did,
abandoning the Byzantine style
to fill the barrel of the chapel’s chest
with a crusting flood of cruelties.

Now this flank is skewered by a painted spear
but that eye’s removed by an actual chisel;
the feast of radishes, garlic and defacements
is arranged according to local harmonics
that must mean the lovely flaking Desislava,

the doomed Sebastocrator Kaloyan,
stare at me from the bear’s matt eyeholes:
the whole Second Kingdom is jostled in there
between the Tatars and the Turks.
Clearly the bear is jerking at the end

of the same Ottoman rope as Vassil Levski,
its paw raised in that saluting fist
Frank Thompson raised before Stoyanov’s
firing squad – and then, before I get on
to the communists and their umbrellas,

the fit is past, the bear is back on all fours,
all the fizz of history drains from my brain,
and I can see from its attitude that it
hasn’t taken a step: the entire horo took place
within the singular emptiness that is

my angry skull. So the bear exits, pursued
by me and the Roma and the bearded boy
from Luton and we four sit awhile
in the old mosque reciting prayers
in a further language none of us knows at all.




Horo—dance.