The Park

I.

I now walk back into that shady grove
resembling a cathedral.
Two rows of trees
are planted close to one another,
their trunks so tall that tower,
their branches braiding up their crowns,
and in between the path below
is carpeted with grayish sand,
it reaches just as far as
the end and the beginning of the rows of trees.
On either side the grove extends
with shafts of light and shadows twining.

And that was all. No.
On my way to it
I passed a lake with so industrial a form.
With fading waves its water trembled,
rippled gently every now and then
by diving ducks and falling leaves.

Drawing near the shadow line below the vault
slowly I was walking in upon the path
between the silent trees, so uniformly
straight and sparkling with the air around.
Every step was filtering myself
through a painfully resisting tissue.

The air was cool.

With the tree standing last
the path gradually vanishes into
the road that lies across.

II.

It is a message of time:
mayflies are dancing around the old trunk of an oak.

The tracks of wind upon a mirror.

...

VI.

Between the rows of trees so long ago
I used to see myself.
I wasn’t open then,
I simply was a lack of walls
so that the looks of people penetrated me
to touch the ancient ground. The inner part of me
was a bow-string which
caught the things and all the moments filtering within
and hurled them back outside
through the space-time, clenched in fist,
to the sparkling ocean of the first-born impulses.
Composed and tempered by the inner states which
were born and cultivated in the gardens of the Self,
being a mosaic of interminably rearranging many-coloured
pebbles – gestures, thoughts and words
of the distant dead –
composed of now and ever,
I was imperturbably complete.
So discordant
by their form and time,
close to their basis these
purely human stays converged,
diverging then again below my surface
like seaweeds.

But who can see the looks of a face
behind a closed door?


VII.

The crickets’ choir rages buzzing
as if their voices push me out of day.


VIII.

Existing all within yourself –
what a responsibility towards the world it is!

But what exactly is “within yourself”? Can it be
that you possess the very thing
that you’re in fact a part of, or can
the root be said to own
the soil it clings so deeply to,
or can the stone possess the rocky bed
that’s given it its form and shape? Yourself
is not the spirit, not the body – it’s
another entity, combining them so that they can exist at all –
it is the higher point that looks them over,
it is the farther place that they have headed for. Yourself, it is
the single stone atop the pyramid,
the cast of clay with which you’ll mould a shore,
the lands you fight for with the waters and the night.

Ever more and more,
and ever more completely all within yourself –
astride your shoulders like astride a horse
Nature overtowers you as much as twice your body height.


...

X.

When we die do we depart forever,
do we ultimately sweep as though with fishing nets
all our grips with life and with reality away
off their holds that are so neatly scattered
around our earthly standing spaces –
it seems that death encounters us completely unforewarned,
all unawares we start to fall but still
without the slightest notice even
we release a part of ourselves amidst the air
and it but stays forever there.

One day and to somebody
a withered flower found between the pages
will recount the way I paced the earth.

...

XII.

Faster, faster to the realm of words I wish I could return
for I have stayed too long in the dissecting-room
of spaces hacked and of dismembered moments.


XIII.

The light contains it all
with the gentle might
of an endless possibility.


XIV.

Everyone aspires to
a total voidness which reminds
of the twilight jingle of a herd of sheep
in an ancient forest of oaks.

...

XVI.

So infallibly
swallows find their way and reach their flights upon the sky
flying over many lands unknown to them before,
and trouts spawn but only after they’ve performed the wild,
frantic syncopation dance against the stream of rivers,
flowing at the very end of oceans.
Of a Santorini woman’s kiss I dream,
in my blood I flee aboard Mayflower from an iron bull.
What am I –
one reborn a thousand times, upon whose brain
like a fresco on a fresco
each reincarnation leaves the mark of its own primal music –
now it is my turn to brush the colours of my own, or
am I simply a component of the Universal chain,
just a link resembling other links,
one that could be easily replaced within the whole
with a common memory and common voice,
like the birds and fish?

I don’t remember – I create,
in me the world begins to happen
and then through me it turns to past.


...

XVIII.
the White light’s the mason who lays the bricks
but never it dwells within what it’s built
it is the water that flowing waters its way
before it can melt in the air or vanish deep down in the ground
the White light doesn’t reflect nor does it absorb
it creates the Nothingness

...

XXII.

It’s like a day and night –
one can’t define a border either in the sunset or within the sunrise
delimiting a fallen night from day gone by,
while light gradates towards a lesser light –
there isn’t any borderline between the world and me.
As I am more than all the senses I possess,
the world is something more than all its matter
and there around the subtle middle point where all of them converge
the world begins in me and I begin within the world.
But what is inside me and outside me?
But what for fear, and all the inexplicable anxieties,
the iceberg dreams: why, are they truly inside me,
and then the sun with its conspicuous warmth
and stones with finite number of their forms:
why, are they truly outside me, or
perhaps the wine with its distinct
capacities is also outside me.

Outside is in me but then in me is outside.
I leave my body through its nine departure points
into the realm of dreams and reverie,
into the open space of words
and go amongst my bees
and my own stars.

...

XXIV.

Like loving madly but remaining still unloved
the human looks for what is plain before the eyes
as evidence
of his intimacy with Nature.
To be unwanted a pretender up among the stars,
inept intruder – that is what
appals the reed most truly and so much.
But all of it is so in vain – the spirit is
the justly telling and unfailing sign
of his requited love with Nature.

...

XXVIII.

The sun illuminates the human.
And he develops as a secret scripture
on the face of mother Earth.

...

XXXIII.

If with every look towards the sky a church-bell tolled,
what a rumble there would roll.

tr. by Peyo Karpuzov