Three poems

 

Sofia Metaphors 2022/Tom Phillips

 

1 Grid

 

Knowing the place of old

from walks home over the hill,

but brought back now to look again

at ancient brickwork, renovations,

the old bell, coppery green,

displaced in its tree …

 

Orange petals flame-like in the sun,

this late September morning,

and drying seedpods turning brown

among a crowd of many voices –

languages moving in and out of range –

and this one gathering for a celebration

with cameras and flowers …

 

We approach along horizontals,

come together, exchange, move apart

beside the church’s verticals:

rooftop dome, latticed windows,

mortar growing less orderly

down through centuries,

down through space

where this couple will be married,

down to mosaic pavement, foundations,

and still further, underneath all,

what remains of Roman tombs.

 

Above first small drifts

of the coming autumn’s leaves

and play of shadows

across tile and earth and faces,

the sky holds onto its blue.

 

2 Perspective

 

Drinking beer in old Lenin Square,

overlooked now by Saint Sofia

and authoritarian buildings

repurposed by new authorities,

there’s warmth coming on

in this tail-end of summer.

 

History finds its feet

in the everyday – theirs and ours -

sharing its shifting proximities.

How to look is where to start.

What lurks among shaded tables,

traffic noise, vaulted arcades

and things that might have been?

 

The statue is turning a blind eye

to ambitions that were transformed –

as they always will be –

from anticipated immortality

to more modest survival – here,

where Lenin once surveyed the square,

overlooked now by Saint Sofia.

 

3 Flow

 

A temple to water –

Philip Larkin’s religion –

in this city so far from the sea.

We could navigate by fountains –

from City Gardens to Presidential Palace

to the endlessly repeating fleur-de-lis

in Banski Square, the old baths

now housing city history,

and, beyond that, the hot flow of the springs.

 

Tram announcements cut across

the muezzin’s call. One man unrolls

his mat by red and silver flowerbeds,

another taps messages on his mobile phone

and a third asks me for a cigarette.

 

Apollo holds his place, discretely.

He is modest in bronze,

head turned away as if unsure

where to look while his acolytes

haul and clank empty bottles to the taps,

trusting in the hope that each drop

will grant them health, long life, as they

haul and clank full bottles from the taps,

carrying with them more than a mere commodity.

 

Tom Phillips, 24/9/2022

How Much He Knew: prose pamphlet

For the last few summers I've published little pamphlets gathering up poems from the last 12 months or so. This year, however, it's a piece in prose about my father and the circumstantial evidence that he might have had another secret life. As with the previous online pamphlets, it's entirely free to download and you are more than welcome to read it by clicking on this link.

Dubliners on the Adriatic

Dubliners on the Adriatic

La mia anima è a Trieste…

1

Trieste. Trst. Tristesse.

Rustle of sea birds rising

from this doubling bay,

suggestive echoes along the Canal Grande:

here, of all places, to stumble on

Joyce among the Hapsburgs,

blind bronze staggered mid-stride.

 

Unhinged from its hinterland,

this polyglot port’s piazza’s fading

hulks outline a century’s diminishment:

‘the last foothold before…’ etc, etc,

(barbarism, in short),

Austria-Hungary’s gravestone wedged

in the crotch of the Adriatic.

 

Distant Istria fumes blue in the heat.

White Miramar – from where

reluctant Maximilian despatched

for Mexico (and Manet) – plunges

foolishly above the sea,

imperial mockery mocked,

the silver, unmoving sea.

2

City of sighs,

where the wise

keep their eyes on

the empty horizon,

though no ships come

and the quays are dumb

as Franz Ferdinand

lumping up the Corso,

dead. Or the Risiera

where the Jews were killed.

 

3

But staggering mostly, by ill-repute,

he was, from quay to quay,

until Consul’s counsel held sway,

and he teetered off to the bahnhof.

 

Under palms, under plane trees,

Joyce whistled off-key by the Chiave D’Oro,

(girls there knowing him, by ill-repute),

for his Triestine tryst with Nora.

 

With other tongues loose in his mouth –

Honest, Jim, she’ll smell them on your breath! –

and her fresh-flustered from the Zurich train,

he fanfared her exile into his free world,

waltzed her through statued gardens,

his animated, Babelous greeting:

‘Per donna, jam hors de clay.’

 

Tom Phillips

From 'Recreation Ground' (Two Rivers Press, 2012)