PREAMBLE

There's a man with a cardboard house on his back
I walk up to and ask where he plans to spend the
night.  It's nighttime already he tells me, then
raises his eyes to mine and says it's all right;
you don't want to know everything.


SONG 6 A.M.

What house did you stay in, when you were alive?
The same place I lived, when I was a child

Which way did you go, when it was time to leave?
The compass was broken, and I dragged my feet

And what did you say, in saying good-bye?
The wind said it for me, I didn't have time

Those you left, where are they now?
Still saying prayers, way before sundown

When you make your comeback, what will you find?
The devil lives there, but he doesn't mind

What do you see, when you look back?
Cracks in a mirror, the sun hot on my track

And what do you see, when you lift your head?
The same dream I had, before going to bed


BEGGING TO DIFFER

The ascension to eye level
in sheer cliffs of new-swept snow
on the front steps of a church

in a downtown side street
with a trim neon hum
in air hovering pink

gives some idea
but so does your love

If the world does go on
distracting in no way I can
get used to with the deft
changing shapes of its strangeness

but so does your love

the doctors will slyly mask
a retreat from their bloody
assault on a body's secrets
to keep it arrested 
in a dream state

but so does your love

the doctors will slyly mask
a retreat from their bloody
assault on a body's secrets
to keep it arrested 
in a dream state

but so does your love

gestation and generation
are terms our son beads in on
in a crossword that's the assigned 
science homework for his third grade

hunched like a question mark
above vigorous smudges of his
uncertain spelling

If nothing can be lonelier
than an uncradled pay phone
exposed above a snow bank

it is the loneliness makes me sing

but so does your love


FURTHERMORE

Tonight
our black giant appears
to be riddled with bullet holes
This if it is cold-blooded slaughter
must have occurred before anyone saw what happened
No witnesses step forward though some claim to have
kept their eyes on the sunset the whole time

Late 
this afternoon one model
sparrow was observed trying to pick
the littered bulk of its overgrown shadow
up from the sidewalk one grain at a time then just
lifting off
apparently with the whole thing


TYPOGRAM FOR VACLAV HAVEL (JANUARY 1990)

xOxxx
xPENx
xxxxxx

Vyt Bakaitis was born in Bitėnai, Lithuania. He grew up in northern Germany and eastern Massachusetts. In 1968, having finished formal studies at Boston University, and having traveled on three continents, he made New York his home. He now lives in Brooklyn, with the artist Sharon Gilbert and their two children. Bakaitis is the author of a book of poems and a book of translations of poems by the Lithuanian poet and filmmaker Jonas Mekas. His versions of poems by Holderlin, Mickiewicz and Mekas are included in a Norton anthology of world poetry.