Dance Macabre

The dance did not begin
or end with sex -
we just fell over each other, a spin,
an innocent trip in the darkness.

We held onto each other
to keep the illusion of sameness
from day to dawn: a changeless colour.
It took the hopelessness

out of despair - expressos
stretched our words to balance
tight-rope walkers' gains and losses,
only by staying in a trance

hour after hour. Our longing has become
the need carefully to tell
about life's last connundrum:
how we learn at last to fall,

to roll, and walk towards the night
with nothing in either hand
except the memory, still gripped tight,
of the indefinable, defined.

+++

stacked Up

stacked up
stashed away
secreted

everything i wanted to tell you
everything i would have told you

everything

The Road

It is not the same road
it is different

it moves forward
in the same way
with the same white line

the car
handles the long bends well
- as before -
and glides ahead
following a long white line
the same white line

it is different
all the other cars
have turned off dropped
back and the houses
have longer spaces
between them

that song
on the radio
is in another language

a beautiful song
a melody that floods
my car like a scent

like a person's
exotic perfume

how easy
it is to love that song
whose words to me
are sounds full of promise

the hill-shapes whose
long outlines are

horizons without knowledge
where birds are wheeling
with bird-names
I do not know

and where
each smile and every
beautiful glance

belongs to someone
whose heart beats
beyond my understanding

hidden from me
on this road
that is getting stranger

in this land
I see rolling
on through my windscreen

rolling off
in the mirror.

Extract from Chat Rooms and Envelopes

Think of a park after snow
two tone trees
white mounds where shrubs
have vanished -
its crystalline expanse
the white tablet
nothing has touched

and you about to rush
headlong into it...

when everything in you
should be waiting
silent as a lens.

Wait longer, until
from the other end
of the park - you see
there is someone there -
a figure is walking
to reach the centre.

That is where you too
thinking your warmest thoughts
must walk by a separate path
some time in the future soon
until you reach that spot:
the intersection where
your trail of footsteps
meets that trail -

keep walking
calmly and without extraneous
movement, knowing that

the two lines of footprints,

where you did not meet,

will cross crookedly, yours

and those - you won't regret

the compactness of this hieroglyph.

The Rationale

Maria Esdovin is a Perovian poet living in London. Her forthcoming collection "The Sensual Crayon" is to be published by the Perovian Arts Collective. For contractual reasons Maria is not able to blog her poems; she is however permitted to talk about them and quote reasonably fully from her own work.
That is why she has asked me to start this blog. In this way I can transcribe the interviews that over the next weeks Maria has promised to give.