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Tchouhov
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When the waiter
brought me
my steaming bowl of soup -
as hot as if it had come straight
out of the bowels of a volcano -
the dusk outside was singing
in the husky voice of a tramp,
to the accompaniment of the rain.
Two tables away a checkered old man
was staring introvertedly into his plate,
his ashplant, proper up against the other chair
trying desperately but in vain
to burst into blossom.
The TV set behind the bar
gave out gusts of perfumed laughter
and in the eye of all the girls
I could see the world reflected -
I was the only one
who wasn’t there!
They have a swimming
pool on their chimneyless rooftop
flat
like people’s antediluvian notion of the Earth, A.D.
She’s fat and always sweating,
the stains under her armpits -
southern seas.
He lights his pipe, if there’s no wind,
and snores at night like a lawnmower,
dreaming of his children sailing in an umbrella
back to distant England.
In the meantime the moon is bored
and looks like a yawn
wrapped in the sky’s liverish mantle,
and a chimney-sweep climbs down from it
and goes for a swim in a pool.
Her attitude to life
is summed up by a single verb:
to breathe.
She sleeps too long: her dream
has flowed out into the room -
it has flooded the clock
and is tugging the icon
of the Madonna with Child.
She wakes up, horrified.
She gradually comes to her senses
and realizes - unhurriedly
someone is admiring
her body.
Alas, it’s not a prince, so,
regretfully, she goes back to sleep.
What an enormous house,
you could go round it on a horseback,
or better yet, on a roller-coaster,
he thought, as he entered.
“Shall I show you the room
where my shoes live?”
She took the flowers and led the way.
He could hardly keep up, he was soon out of breath,
in the end the corridor twisted away like a broken limb,
he saw a chamber full of hundreds and hundreds of shoes,
he cried out with amazement, then with pain -
he had collided with her wheel-chair.
She was a designer but she said
she observed Lent,
and it had just begun.
I turned the volume up
and slammed the bottle down
but, to my surprise, it didn’t break.
“Don’t worry”, she whispered to me,
“you’ll get used to my clothes,
you’ll even come to miss them later!”
In the lobby of my building I see
fewer and fewer
faces
and more and more obituary
photographs
the countess from the third-floor flat
didn’t come back from the post office
while the madman left
to spend Christmas with Christ
the twin sisters
sank into the sky
in search of husbands
my neighbour with the artificial leg
leaps out of bed
towards the TV screen
where the end of the century
is passing
along Sunset Boulevard
To be a man
is vulgar
but still prestigious:
taller in stature,
with defining muscles
and a hairy hothouse garden
that silverplates the flesh.
“I am a man”,
he says as he goes to bed
but his voice is so weak
that the sleeping beauty
deep in the bowels of his body
cannot even hear him.
* Translated by Kalina
Filipova
Haiku by Petar Tchouhov
More selected works by
Petar Tchouhov on the internet (in
Bulgarian):
Poetry,
short stories, tales and plays at slovo.bg
Poetry,
haiku, short stories and translations at liternet.bg
Poetry
and short stories at litclub.com |
