HEAT Series 1

I was raised with ghosts. They were always there, lurking about the upright piano and watching me as I slept. They wrote notes to my parents on the big sheets of butchers’ paper which were spread across the living-room floor each night.

As Wittgenstein said, translating is an exact art. That’s why the interesting thing one notices immediately about good writing in translation is the notion of care, of close attention, of stillness and of shape. Translation is above all an ideational endeavour, a reaching towards hidden absolutes, and its texture is as distinct a piece of language experience as philosophy or art.

Cottage. The four worn steps. / Clusters of purple lilac. / Know it? / And now, forget.

worms gnawing on my slats / drop their sound into the water / my fear becomes the crier / and screams: / watch out it’s collapsing

as

The one who cares / is the one you abandon / to the slow germination / of village days.

And the hypocrites. And the jealous distractions. Subtle. And the use. And irony is only a form of knowledge, of suggests, a security of loss, a sullen (latin) satin (knowing is something you do behind it’s back, a you-beaut substitute), me mean.

‘I’m home!’ he announces, mock-joyous. He steps and gestures, uncoiling his left hand towards her. He is both the Kelly boys, Gene and Ned. Luisa says nothing to him. She smirks at Sam’s dance, but she refrains from telling him out loud how lacking in grace he is. She could have said something, but his moves weren’t that bad. She would have been lying. Instead, she talks to someone else.

Four women came to visit me. / They all wore the same dress. / Not four identical dresses / but one dress encased all the four women. / How was this possible? / The dress was like a large pomegranate. / Each had her place within it.

there was a kind of sweet loneliness / standing alone at the dark water / eating the hot dog that my father / would have bought me

“It’s all right, Dad,” I whisper. / “Stay with me. / I know exactly where I’m going.”

Small things betray us. / The jaw that aches as the oxygen dwindles. / Deep and delicate this depression / as it walks across me into the other world.

You slipped out of the noisy corridor / into perpetual dawn / with the first birds stirring over the broken back fence / with footsteps moving over the frost

I’ve become Australian to the extent of understanding that locals would have to have a different optic despite the legitimacy of the foreign view. However, chauvinism and parochialism remain as issues in themselves.

Their language was not Ukrainian, but equally it was not Russian. It was a mixture.
“We are not Russian, we are Ukrainian,” my grandmother says to me in Russian whenever, as a child, I ask her about her language.
My grandmother asks my mother a question in Ukrainian, my mother answers in English.

There was Death / in the crowd, listening / to the blind singer / songs of seeing, songs of longing.

Stiff or sinuously,
those roots of stumps, piled up, are warriors’
spokes