Zbornik Mednarodnega literarnega srečanja Vilenica 2004 - Ljudmila

Aleksandar Prokopiev
Three Oxfordshire Gardens
I
Somewhere between certainly and maybe, in another time you were one
of Cupid’s puttis, with juicy saliva in the corner of your lips. And the
change to angel was so easy, like that of an embryo liberated from his
tender membrane (where the inner water’s a little cloudy) when he
hatches from his chrysalis. When he bursts out in a second with a gasp to
become a human butterfly flying to the other world lightly, genderless.
And now, when you’re accustomed to every day, every year and every
century having the same routine, the same colour: a sudden break. Someone
notices you, spots you stuck like a dwarf with your baby head snapped
off then glued back again: grey in the growing garden.
You could have chosen to be placed in a luxurious wagon lit waving
and winking your long lashes at the people on the platform, then travelling
on into some famous Pre-Raphaelite image. But instead you chose to
be set in Barry and Rosie’s garden with your palms up but without your
platter of fruit. Every day the sky gets closer and closer and perhaps Atlas’
overwhelming experience is waiting for you. But you don’t seem so
confused in your fat nudity, wearing only a sash. Where you sit, you can
smell most intensely the momentariness of flowers: in April, white and
Arum lilies; in May, lilac with its pyramidal flowers, wild olive and pear;
in June, linden. How many nuances of plants, of wood, you feel, stone
baby, in these months, in the corner of the garden!
II
Martha, the fourteen-year-old Jack Russell, who has quite a charming
muzzle but a very moody character, is lying in her basket in front of me as
I sit on the garden bench. The dog doesn’t allow herself to be stroked but
she leans her cheek gently against my right ankle.
It occurs to me to wonder without fear whether this sulky dog, today’s
flowers, the rain like a light shower you can turn off with one twist, Fiona’s
small working house, Coleshill, is all happening now, to me; or whether
it’s outside me, as if in a water-colour landscape called, perhaps, Allergic
Cough?
Although now I notice some hidden details: fugitive shadows in the
bottom left of the picture (and hands which in their hurry to escape look
like the branches of an imaginary tree).
Very slowly my body, too, turns into another, in an oil painting called
The Macedonian Visiting Fiona’s Home or something similar. His profile
rests in two hands which partly hide his face. He watches the typical
English spring countryside, the terrier and the young woman with bare
feet: and it seems to me that he, there in the picture frame, is very, very
satisfied. Like a comfortable voyeur.
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