Windows in the east-facing hills catch the sun
of movement-moments that fire, and flutter out.
Crossing thousands of miles of time, the barest touch
and brush of day-breaking light.
**
I’ve heard mountains grow at nearly the same rate
as fingernails, and continue too,
well after we’re gone.
**
**
—Bulgaria
Sofia’s morning streets are dark at six;
groups of young men, small windowed store-fronts,
coffee, hand-held breakfasts—talk, laughter and smoke
crowd the sidewalks.
Pastel colored cabs stop if you wave—women,
mostly in pairs, do that.
**
Twenty thousand years of human activity,
be it the Balkans or the Sierras—we don’t know
who they were, but related seems true enough.
**
Driving to the interior today, having slept
longer stretches without waking,
but still deeply tired, she asks the count
of days left till we return home—I laugh
(but make the calculation)—
touring with a group, no longer just us two,
reveals pandemic-shaped parameters
unknowingly adopted—
among the other strangers, we meet
our post-Covid selves.
**
Rolling west through open Thracian lowlands
—arbors in every yard, roadside markets,
mist-distant mountains, fall gold-yellows
and withered leaf wheat-country meadows.
**
Of the seven hills of ancient Plovdiv, six remain
for counting—the seventh disappeared
with its minerals.
**
Bulgarian roses are gown for their oil.
Petals picked in the morning
stem the oil’s return
to the root.
**
Along A-1, open plain lowlands.
Mountains to the south shared with Greece,
to the north conceal the Balkans.
And the road sign points to Istanbul.
**
We cross the Balkans today at their lowest pass,
where they drop into the not really black
Black Sea,
**
**
—Romania
Cross the Danube to the North
and you’ll find the Latin alphabet
you thought you’d lost.
**
—Bucharest, Revolutionary Square:
—The cen r is ever
te y where
off-
center
un-finish -d—
**
Birds circle statues in sky-clearing blue
chill, sidewalks accepting every foot
that chooses to fall, whatever
the way taken.
**
We leave the city today by train;
mountains and forests, the last leg
of our touring,
a quiet good-by— empty hotel restaurant,
hot coffee—talk-memories linger
above the pen’s morning liturgy.
**
Some of those poets in old China
were on to something
they just couldn’t get into words
either—the day’s ebbs and flows,
unfinished conversations, aimless flashes
of joy embedded in just hanging-out,
can leave the best-gripped pen
right where it rests.
**
Recrossing Transylvania’s Carpathian range,
meandering fall-kissed forests,
glistening roadside streams, we return
to its southern plains,
the ring of shadowed mountains,
fields of wheat and sun flowers,
that all say it’s time too,
to return home.
We don’t resist, will not linger;
but the taste of this has found with us
a place.
**
And the leaves in Bucharest,
golden weaving messengers,
blanket the ground
with fall’s call.
And the smell,
dust-burnt-fresh,
crushed and rustled
to chilled park air,
leaf upon leaf, myriads
of passing feet.
**
And I recall our host, standing at the edge
of the wooden press that inked the first letters
of the first Romanian words ever written, script
formed and printed by those not Romanian,
as he spoke of the importance of our presence,
our attention, to the process taken place then,
taking place now—it’s not so much the language,
he said,
but the culture, the “culture of movement
as expression of being” that makes
in its making, Romania Romanian—and indeed
together all of us, who we are, who we will be.
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