Waving at Mom

Wszystkiego najlepszego, Mamo! All rhymes unintentional.

pink foam

dripping with sunlight

coalesced into pebbles of glass

with minuscule swirls

that you step on

and pass.

a fan

the color of flan

crisply cut like a chip full of stripes

lying down on the ground

in the sand.

tiny cones

full of ice cream

vanilla

into strawberry

melting into peaches and cream

or cappuchino

into chocolate

into blueberry

open your mouth and eat with your eyes

the waves never stop

in our lives

gnarled, indigo twists

abruptly

cut

at the edges.

Everything Was New Again

We were late for the birth of the new world – the bloodied head of the sun was already peeking out of the waters as we ran towards the beach. A half disk with a horizontal line of light hair floating on the sea, it entered the sky with nearly visible speed.

When we got to the edge of the beach, the world was saturated with meaning. We took off our socks in awe and respectfully dipped our toes in the edge of the vast, all-engulfing plane of pink purpled by gently thundering waves.

The other edge was occupied by a sailboat, the sky was full of dancing birds, and I believed that generations of ears sophisticated by postmodernism and sacrilegious ringtones will never make Für Elise ugly.

Ferrara that day was a disappointment – tired after our morning walk, we were falling asleep.

Two ends of a question

A loose collection of impressions from last week's excursion to Durdle Door.

A white wall suspended above me. Up, up, up, I strain my neck to see to the top, crowned in blue sky. The stone is chalky-smooth, an uncomfortable premonition of squeaks against a blackboard. Up, up, up, a knot in my stomach, this is it, this is beauty.

Hopping from stone to stone, here I go, into another little cavern! I don’t know what makes all these enclosed spaces so thrilling. Small winding paths in deep forests, surrounded by tangles of weeds and overhanging branches, narrow routes to mountain peaks, underground mines, tunnels, caves, it’s all the same sort of thing. It might be the exquisite combination of the undisputable cosiness of such places and the fear for your life lest the walls should decide to grind you to a messy pulp. You feel terrified out of your mind and at the same time very much at home. Plus, there’s the otherworldly experience of looking out of your little cave, onto a picture framed with stone.

There aren’t very many seashells on the Southwest coast, but there’s another attraction – seaweed. Clevedon has the bubble wrap ones that you can stomp on and make squishy sounds with; they come in all shapes and sizes – hats, hearts, ears, you name it. The seaweed near Durdle Door is different. Once in a while you chance upon a mop of brownish-green hair, but mostly there are the long, rubbery stripes that make such beautiful belts. One thing that sets them apart from seashells is the uncanny ability to transform any car, at least smell-wise, into a storeroom for rotting fish.

First there is a little tunnel in the cliff ahead of us. Then there isn’t. You know that the thing obstructing the view must be a solid piece of rock jutting out of the seabed, but still it has the ethereal quality of a painted cloud. One minute the space between the rock and the cliff is tangibly three-dimensional, the next it is non-existent. Until finally, as we stroll on towards it, the rock moves to the side, revealing yet again the rays of the setting sun poking through the little tunnel.

There is an island of stones afloat on the sea, aflame with the red sunlight, licked by white tongues of fiery waves. A powerful symbol. Of what nobody knows.

The grass above Durdle Door is orangey-green and the shadows upon it are blue. As I walk across the beach, I search for the quiet that had been all around me in the Pyrenees. I should be able to find it here – the road is too far away to hear, humans other than us have been scared away by the settling dusk, all is still save the ever-pulsating rhythm of the tide. But as I take each step along the shoreline, I find myself composing these very lines. The echo of my stream of consciousness throbs in my head, magnified, magnified. Can I no longer appreciate without describing? Do I not understand anything before I place a label underneath it?

How difficult it is to write this article. Durdle Door beach was so real, so presently beautiful, with no need for words to explain it. Can I ever adequately describe the world I appreciate? Can I possibly place an accurate label underneath my experiences?

Dubrovnik described

Yesterday I mentioned the ice cream man from Dubrovnik. It so happens that I once wrote a description of this town. Enjoy!

“Aren’t there just too many good things here?” – these were my brother’s first words after seeing Dubrovnik. It sums up the city, I think, very well. A charming medieval town, surrounded by the breathtaking magnificence of mountains on one side, and the vast, calm blueness of the sea on the other, perhaps it’s indeed too much of a good thing.

The most amazing part of Dubrovnik is the old town, located at the city’s center. But even before you get there, you find yourself surrounded by beauty. Palm, orange, and lemon trees grow beside roses, tulips, and blooming forsythias. It makes you think of Eden, where all flowers bloomed at once in everlasting harmony of colors.

The houses hugged by these plants fit in with the view marvelously. Mediterranean cottages with roofs of a rich reddish-brown, the color of the region’s fertile soil, so comfortable and homely, cuddle against the slope.

When you get to the historical city center, you forget all about the beauty of the town's other parts. The wall surrounding it is almost intact, a somewhat stocky, but yet majestic reminder of past centuries. The main road of Dubrovnik seems more fit for the inside of a palace than for a town. White marble glittering in the sun...

A maze of narrow streets spreads out from both sides of the main road. That’s the part of Dubrovnik I adore the most. The streets rise up steeply, wind this way and that, then slide back down. The houses on opposite sides of them seem to be trying to get as close to each other as possible, often by means of clotheslines.

What is most amazing about this place is the life within it. These houses are not merely historical monuments, but modern families’ homes, alive with everyday sounds. Conversations drift to your ears from behind ancient doors, hints of meals being prepared float through the air. Signs of people’s lives are everywhere. You can’t help being curious about them. And you feel the mystery of everyday life. Everyday life in a one-of-a-kind place.