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The winter is still and snowed flowerbeds are dreaming of the butterflies drawn on the windows of the hothouse where the red lips of Anthurium lean towards Aglaonema. Dendrobium is calm and sorrowful and prim is Paphiopedilum insigne. Laelia anceps opens its rose enigma and is wed to Begonia Bettina.
I see Ms. Tomson walking from the porch to take a tidy look at Clerodendron, already cared for, watered and left to blossom by the gardener with beads of sweat maturing on his glistening forehead. Meanwhile the colonel wearing a shining, creaking helmet is out in the garden, caressing Acalypha with his yellow finger.
Remember how we were disappearing in Hovea Belmor forests, inhaling an insane female aroma of Hoffmania discolor.
The end of list. It's January, night. Grandfather has just finished his translation. Machine gun series of the old steel Underwood are still reverberating in the air. Grandmother smokes her cigarette, and from my bed the world is wavy, gray and flowing on the black-and-white lactating screen.
The snowflakes long for light and merge with the list of solemn Latin names, with the vaporizing smell of Eucalyptus: sweet influenza of childhood set in the freezing desert of the Eurasian city.
Mosaic Mediterranean colors: milk and soot. Rectangular fragments of stone houses scattered on the cliff, touched up by the moss of trees. Spacious clay vase broken, pieces stopped short of falling into the sky.
Invisible scooters - buzzing insects are born by the cliff and disappear into the cliff, carrying someone’s souls to their destinations. From point zero to zero: fireflies of life, smoldering after the volcano erupted.
There is sparse parking here, but John Steinbeck did not need a parking spot. He drank his scotch in oblivion, good man of letters, one of 6000 alphabets. Then vanished before it’s to late, mourning life at it’s conception as a real poet at dawn, when the first boat departs for an unnamed island.
Reverberating sounds of jets delivering emissaries everywhere.
Summits growing more representative outshadowing deep death valleys.
Damp jungle air gently caressing carefully burnt faces of perpetually investing Floridians.
5 p.m., Sunday, news time, anchors getting down to the core of the events:
Clintons’ vacation in Spain, march in Northern Ireland, 10 year olds shooting at the British Royal Commandos
with water pistols, ready for the game, July 5 fireworks in Vermont, delayed news of the Independence.
Everyone turns the TV off, dresses up in anticipation of dinner with close ones and comes to an evening mass,
parking a car properly on designated lots. Bottomless dark TV screens live their own independent lives:
Hong-Kong skyscrapers casting shadows over the century's no man's land,
disguised Khmer Rouge in dusty fatigues relentlessly advancing along the streets of Phnom Penh
toward the airport, armored personnel carriers sporting banners with Jean Paul Sartre looking prospective and positive,
as if he is still sitting over glace at a table in a boulevard cafe.
First comes the light, being the aperture of dark as the evening
stays still. One can guess the trajectory of the night beings
invisible, almost insensible. The brushstroke precision makes them blend
with what forever waits behind two lit windows. Trees at the front are dark arrows
grown from the unimaginable into the painting's essence, which will last as long as it
allows one not only to see, but to breathe it in. Even afterwards this will remain
a glass, infinitely transparent. The orderly facade implies some sturdy-settled household. The trees
are well tended but not trimmed. Beyond the fence there is a garden, perennially rustling.
One cannot hear a sound, feel a movement, yet one knows, there must be a sound since the light
and a sound are reflections of the same. There is no street sign, number or a name.
Only the signs of a human omniabsence: little silent pond, part of a bay, or else
a strait, that harbors quiet boats beyond the frame. It feels as if an opaque story of a family
nests behind the house, in the garden that is the insects' paradise, the world of tireless rodents.
Vestiges of life are stirring in the back rooms. The walls hold reflections of the perpetuating shadows,
not moving anymore, but paused in their domestic eternity: holding a teacup, a knife, someone's hand stretched in
an attempt to reach for something, that it will never reach. The only link
between the objects is the sky, as unassuming as the sky could be in its generously aimless
evening lightness. Its axis is the streetlamp— a counterpoise and the foundation of an ample-
ness of the void. We try to leave it in the self-saving and comforting oblivion,
as we turn away from the visage of putrefaction, from the move into motionlessness.
There canvas echoes passion of suppression. This is a dominion of light, the world where everyone is gone.
I have a box with seven cards, my hope and the flame of my nights.
The first has a window into the sunny land, although the glass is frosted and one can't see the end.
This card is worth all other cards: it has the sky, stone, ice and three thousand birds.
The second card still smells of smoke; on the burnt surface it shows a block,
that can't be walked, or driven, or lived in. It harbors frozen breath of sky, that is now crystalline.
The third card is plain, it’s black and white though through a small window it shows light
above treetops’ cathedral spires. This card is almost mute, like a smoldering fire.
The fourth one tells the story and makes me smile. It is a circus train, it is a wild
life of style behind the smooth veneer. It sparkles with smirks, but leaves one with a fear
that is indefinite. The box has a fifth card, old and yellow, long ago cracked.
It shows the stony road, crisp night, scents of mountain flowers,morning light
and of a woman. This is a letter that was sent when I was born. I'll keep it to the end.
The sixth card’s been played too many times, and flows in a stream with hundreds of names.
The last card is silent. There no one can speak. The wall is lit. Every brick
is lit by light that can't be seen but can be sensed. The one who feels this light is blessed.
This is a letter to a floating heart. This one is the last in a box – just an old postcard.
Poems by Andrey Gritsman
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