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SHAMSHAD ABDULLAEV, translated by Darlene Reddaway

A Taste for the Coast One season: and we arrive here too late, having come from south to north, on the way back. Past the window lattice smoke sputters and the stone house catches fire, like a pale yellow mirage in a fruitful field honored on special days by the calm. From the outer wall amidst marketplace junk, there's less coal than eyes winding up walls from the Sunday crowd where ears of harmsir* grow amidst the yellow. It was not the river that flowed, but the things reflected in it that rippled in cadence, and clocks and clouds took off upstream, as if you were heading for the wide water amidst whirling park wasps and women, when the bilious awn bowed before the bazaar fire pit, and to your father's unclean shadow. The picture pelted backwards, into the thick of the quiet emulsion. Wind and waves. _________ * a kind of grain Week's End Bridge, horizon, or wall in the distance – it's not important. We, thank God, are banished from the city – if only for a time; a serious step. But as before, we're so helpless we can't worship nature, so instead we worship the Personlessness in which we abide this entire waning day. And neither by prayer, nor frenzied naivete, nor fleeting artlessness can anyone be saved who boasts of too useless an anonymity, having chosen impassable roads. We survey the world, for now unfamiliar – and because of this we seem to see nothing at all (or has the thing seen deprived us of our sight?). The glade, the reservoir, the pellet, the mulberry, and the wagon, overswept with weeds, and suddenly, – God knows from where she came – a churchgoer who adjures us: "Silence." And right away: a click of the Spidola*, where, a moment ago, were muttering voices, women and men in various languages, making it seem we had an archetypal audio map of the world, – a sign offered to the Sunday silence. We turned the noise off. A lone breeze rustled an old piece of straw and vanished in the colorless air. Nettles swayed below and lay down – under them a small oval of earth was exposed, like a wound, and in an instant it was hidden again and overgrown by the grass: windlessness, no sound. I held my breath. You touched, as per a script, my breast with your palm. Then, like inevitability, a girl walked along the low hill (limping!) and froze at the end of the glade, as if the silence had already foretold the childish figure on this spot or had sent her ahead to meet us. How can all this be saved? For whom are you waiting? __________ * A brand name Lithuanian radio manufactured in the 1960s. A Propos of a Greek Photograph Sea, insect, horse. To gaze, torturing the eyes. Flies were minted along the center – snuffed air. Stone, a small mainspring, worm under hand – untouched earthly trifle. He fell asleep in Belaqua's pose; neither alive nor dead. A tear, as if a needle, catches the elusive swelling of lips on a scorched face. Without a cry he opened his eyes – or rather, they themselves, for his lack of concern, surfaced from his lids. An unseeable essence stared through the millennium at the road sign. In the end, not stirring, he licks drops from his lips and feels the aftertaste of melancholy – in God's right hand, in a dead tavern, in someone else's bed. Week's End, Film Landscape: like a gift. The spirit streams past domestic twilight (Dreyer forged whiteness above the northerly mold – this take is for redemption, the Irish monk said and plunged into the water where the mud sloped downward and at foggy midday the depth steamed above a distant drowning victim). So flows the Comforter. Livestock eat something like communion wafers but the sun drives dogs and gray window panes out of their mind in the neighboring yard. Friends, hands dancing in a summer cafe. Only the concrete has a name. The river, rising, endures the phosphorescence of workers' quadrants; nowhere. And behind the house dust careens in a granular prism: the local dead end will scarcely dry out. We go still further talking under our breath or humming "The Salsbury." Not chaos, but controlled chaos, like a river whose current raises the dead in vain: fish, suicides. The ancient ray streams from one street into another. Long shadows descended into the cool room from southern roofs: opposite. A moment consists of a thousand dark leeches, its facet work lengthens. Sunday dust is all in our eyes. Week's End: Walk with a Friend So they walked, out onto the hilly vista – so broad that the worn path became more visible, while the frayed curve of the fence with its pungent-green, mossy covering and the dirty gust of wind, arising from the dead end to overtake us, as it always does, from behind, worked together, deafening the epic decor, like Paris, as first seen through the eyes of Rousseau in all its fat, cackling lackluster. Compressed by creeping dust and shaggy sprouts of shrubs the cheap expanse is exactly here. We slow our step, infected by the silence. Everywhere It breathes. A Something. A comforting duration, a blazing sun, beetles shift heavily like sullen pilgrims on the stubble to expose – each time suddenly – while bursting into flight, their pale, very pale-rose wings. You think we'll be saved this way, constantly holding our own, like "them." I'm stuffed to the gills with the feigned ordinariness of summer's expanse. We lie, having spread our arms on the trampled field – two crosses from a bird's eye view; I grope a young reed, clutching at evasive fragility with my nail; and you read about how Rimbaud died (is dying): words, prompted by pain, – "allah karim" but the angel is already up for grabs (every Sunday.)

Шамшад АБДУЛЛАЕВ

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