Learning Sofia

1

You see I’m discovering

how beyond the Wedgewood House

(the house we’ve called that,

painted Wedgewood blue),

there’s a Peace Embassy

set back from the road.

It’s in a quiet street

in a quiet quarter.

And almost finding my feet now

on eruptive tiled pavements,

I’ve time to look up

at cornice flourishes, balconies –

glassed in or greenery filled –

and statues from another era.

2

And statues from another era

stake out street corners, parks.

Empty-handed, arms upraised,

they’re holding onto spaces

for a future that might still be.

The artist with his bag of canvasses

catches his breath outside

the window displays

of an agricultural cooperative shop.

He’s been taking the measure

of striated plaster facades,

graffiti’d schoolyards,

symptoms of a transition

that he’ll not see complete.

3

In pollarding season, we’re coming home

where they’ve been along with chainsaws

and the men stood around to watch

with their advice and paper cups of coffee.

Routines we’re getting used to occur

among these amputated branches,

the stumps they’ve painted green. 

We watch our breaths steam

while shoppers prod squashes

for those that give to the touch

and worsening weather holds off

beyond the limits of ice-blue sky.

Only the mountain shoulders the clouds

signalling the end of this gypsy summer.

4

So, yes, we’re laying down coordinates,

here in downtown Sofia.

We’re learning its vein-patterns

like a hand held up to the light.

And there’s something in the air again

that’s hastening these renovations –

cobbled streets renewed, apartment blocks

whose ridged roof tiles they’re hauling up

by hand and swing out in rope slings

above passers-by, refuse trucks, those backpackers.

And so yes, as you see, we’re on Slivnitsa Boulevard,

between number 214 and number 216,

and the buses on the main road will stop at Stochna Gara

just as I have, here, for the first time, on this street.