The Three Baskets

 
The Summer Contents of Light

Two

We witnessed together –
a flower with petals of blue was cracking a rock.

...

Eleven

I saw: my heart stood up and headed on its own
down the path
between the bees and thorny thistles.

...

Fourteen

And on a starlit night in August I can feel
the stars above are all at home.


tr. by Peyo Karpuzov


All Saints

Two

The village cannot explain,
but that place, where
village animals (no cows and pigs) gather together,
as if for a walk, on Sundays at dusk,
where no one is willing to build,
where you can't go just like that, but tune yourself
like a musical instrument, to be played on
with invisible fingers, is only
a big sloping meadow with
a venerable oak tree in the center and
a squat stone cross
knocked in at its foot.

tr. by Hristianna


The Three Baskets

One

Those pastoral moments of orderliness!
The past is put within a basket,
the present lies within the second while the future’s in the last:
these are three baskets into which
the human scatters his existence
that has been poured upon his head.
His body limited in three dimensions
accordingly imposes them on time,
while reason argues loudly in a way,
that these dimensions seem to be reality
and not to have been just created to
sustain the equilibrium between
the physical and the spiritual halves.

One invents the past
and puts there all impossible attempts,
endeavours doomed and finished bodies.
The past commandingly
beguiles towards itself just like a chasm
whose emptiness beguiles towards its bottom
the one who stands upon its ledge.

The present wears the woeful face of clown.
It’s his attempt to enter last and stepping on the stage
to say his final words – the time to make the balance,
the place where reason is confronted with existence
for a last decisive battle. But
the audience refuses to acclaim those tedious
and half-forgotten jokes. It turns
that there’s no circus, no arena,
no zebras neither elephants at all.
It also turns
that there’s no audience but for the clown who speaks before his face.
The present is the human’s conscientious effort
to join the universal cosmic order.

The basket coming last – the future –
is woven on the very base of air
from twisted twigs that fall apart. It is
the anguishes of love that cannot be requited:
the human craves affection
and puts on canvass with his heart
portrayals of a mutual feeling but
this passion will not be requited
for neither does he know the thing that he desires
nor does it know the one who longs for it. And what remains
is just a parching sorrow.

The time of the human:
there stands the never clearer now
between the passed, forever gone beyond recall,
and the yet unfulfilled uncertainties at hand.

But time is not
a salvage bridgehead in the human’s head,
it’s not the well-known vast expanse
that he himself invents to measure it.
Time isn’t now, it’s not before,
it isn’t even after, time is
the occurring of the spirit,
the shade which follows the existence
and casts its shadows over it. It is
the unperceived stairwell which
the existence crosses over
from one intensity towards the other,
pushed ever further by the acts of the spirit.
If they did not exist at all,
time wouldn’t dwindle
nor would it stop, but it’s through them that
its pulling force and its acceleration tend to grow.
You cannot take away from it,
but you can only put within:
so the rivers
flow into the sea, its waters to increase,
but they remain forever nameless.
All the signs upon the sky are to be found
in time and all at once as well as
all at once within the never coming moment
is their absence.

But who
knows all of this?

tr. by Peyo Karpuzov

...

Three

I see -
your body throwing a shadow on the sand.
Another untamed place on Earth
undiscovered.

...

Seven

I’m strolling the city in want of the devil
or of an angel, or of whoever immortal,
who’ll be describing the places I’m drawn to
unwittingly, telling me
their story.

This shrine was built on the place for sacrifices.
That shapeless tree leafs
a hermit long moldered in its roots.
The air vibration above that stone indicates
the circle amid which
our celestial ancestors have descended.
And right here witches have been burnt.

All that exists
and is just where it’s happened.
Stays ineffaceable, as if
the contrary will prove
the Being is helpless.
The Earth and Water reproduce it,
the Fire saturates the Air with its energy.

The night’s so bright.
Going astray, I’ll see myself
being ripped up by the hidden voices as by horns
and leave no trace.

...

Ten

The yard lamplight has shaped a bell tent
and from the world there's only left
whatever happens to be underneath it -
the bole, the stone tiles and my body.
By turning on the light, abruptly
vanishes from sight the night sky, but remains within me
as an anticipation, until the Ego-light turns off
and it again appears with all its stars and planets,
and thereabouts are also
the bole, the stone tiles and the body.

The small bell tent, hiding the sky.


Eleven

the goat with the sagged udder
is grazing at the very moment
the Universe 's expanding.

tr. by Hristianna

...

Thirteen

It’s autumn:
the leaves are ever fewer in the wind.


Fourteen

Across himself the human steps
and walks beyond into himself.


tr. by Peyo Karpyzov