GIRLS WITH CHERRIED LIPS

Girls with cherried lips are dancing the Beginning. The indiscreet
flare of a minuet lights their bodies, and spectators instinctively
step back for fear of turning to ash. Outlines
change in an instant: extending their flutters they
become the sign of spring that determines peace, and history
loses its great seal. 

Girls with cherried lips, frail as willows,
lose the laces binding them, and spectators glimpse the sun
sliding down their knees. Divine bodies with a smell of
the north, unfit for any anatomical atlas, 

or any niche where plaster Venuses display
ordinary boredom with their longing for pet names and
tobacco. Girls with growing shadows under their lids are dancing
life: goblets full of the past, old still-lives,
the scent of swamps waded in childhood. angels, aged
cherry orchards, sunsets. Finally, they bow to the audience. And yet
this exact replica of moonlight has managed so slyly to fool
our eyes, we are left incapable of perceiving any change. 

the cold abolishes all play with a ban on
music, body radiance, allocating use of light and beauty
only the slimmest ration, according to
decree. And history, the slut with plucked
eyebrows, claims to have vanquished nature:
lips no longer smell of cherries. 

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



THINGS THAT STING             

Things that sting conscious sense, an evaporated summer campari:
the book you opened in a harbor on the Šventoji: the fleet gone,
just a fisherman on his knees, trying to reach the unreal sunrise
that lights up consciousness: the rain dried out, a morning aroma
of smoked perch, and dunes that can't find us. 

Things that sting: jaybird dozing on the porch, the pages
and sand-grains in your mouth, as once sometime back. Though now, here
ever so briefly, the orderly thresholds bed down again for the night:
a clean mouth, obedient solitude, hands washed for childlike sleep,
white communion and naming syllables. 

The way corals grow into a cave, colonies of things nourish a dream. You thought
the things fingers no longer reach all fall apart. Not true, though.
The window still creaks in counting silence: words
throb, encrusted in dust; those desires, tied up
in wires from other dreams; those cities still shining their sunset bridges. 

Plazas murmur, bound up in ivy of other days. Even though now
nothing can be made secure enough. Only the few things that keep stinging
will vanish from sight like tracks of rain and still resurface
like a hand pledging its independence from the roulette-wheel,
from grapes or your hidden initials, then falling to keep it. 

And what should I now revive, if everything that stayed behind 
in dreams consists of trashed parks, blackened carousels that no longer work,
willows conversing by the Vilnelė at night, and a fog dead as dead.
Though while words sleep, everything comes up again. So the day
toward evening will get ready really to live but then run out of time. 

So we two go to sleep to condemn the dream guillotine,
while the effort to wake in Vilnius becomes the one thing that stings
the most. And then I pray the door open and, again, start counting the rain
that things touch before dawn as though it were
a single distant-sounding string.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



CHRISTMAS WREATH

Here again is the swaying Christmas wreath, raised above our sill.
The black cherry begins to feel an incoming joy again. Noontime
lips, like scudding clouds, dry and on the sweet side, will soon announce
the word to a sea in thronging processions searching for shore. It's then
we'll build our bonfire. Crowns and a harness of banners will shine at its core,
until the Hand touches down to let us feel that we are absolved.
 
Pierrot will leave the underpopulated stage for a while, to let the burgundy
settle into his perfect joints. Dead doves will couple while
Ophelias sleep in the downbeds of black ponds and princelings of frost
have horses with clenched jaws on one more winter
to overwhelm us the way the racing rains along the cold and
darkened St. Petersburg canals once did. And for one night our names
will return to the Promised Land before dawn.
 
And in your bed, withering fingers will open the Testament joyously,
while crowds wild with the joy flood the dried up riverbed
on meeting the Redeemer. But the music will end in the Garden, when
the almighty Hand sends a young dove down to let church pillars flash
with the lightning of bells awakened from palms of snow. And it's then
and then only, one or another of us gets up courage to whisper: "You have come."
And the glow of the Christmas wreath lands on a white primal earth.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



BEYOND PROOF, REPETITION, OR REACH

yet unwilled;  snow breaches their skulls at the temple,
and their frowning eyebrows;  secure in the shade
the boat awaits Charon who was destroyed long ago

and at the back of a closet in an old-age home
the last witness born in February snow is dying for
the last time;  so, once again, nothing's been
proven, repeated, or reached

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



A PROPHECY

hawthorns sprouting on the fringes of fields
will not last until haying and the spring having failed
to crack a blind gravestone will splash off like a diver
head first into the sheer void of the unknown
where the Creator's wooden mallet will be resting on the wall

the confounded traveler having lost all coordinates
will go to sleep beside a burning juniper to dream
jugs filled with blood and an old-fashioned loom
weaving in the shelter from the wind a fruitless rain's
trickles to sing the just completed morning

the girl escaped from the fable will fail to await the one
she's fated for and an enraged wind vane shall shatter galaxies
maybe it's just then we'll come to meet the birth of God
in a hotel it's impossible to heat with just two of us and no
candle burning and nothing left to tell each other

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



PETERSBURG, SUMMER OF 1824

church bells are clanging out high noon,
even though the inhabitants in poorer outskirts 
are fishing the channels of the Neva, all still
dreaming the bloated corpses of drowned dogs
and people in the floodwaters from last winter

Mickiewicz sees the hawking storekeepers 
in half-deserted streets with cheeses and sausages
for sale, hears carriages and cabs go flying
through snowdrifts, the girls in booths along
Ekaterina Avenue clicking their stained
tongues

he's just arrived:  back in Vilnius, the sloping Antakalnis
has weathervanes still creaking since the last glimpse 
of him there, with leaves that fell when his carriage roared by
lying as yet untrampled on paths in the park
like undried tears

Petersburg:  one street has a derelict sailboat
with broken masts, a ruptured deck, some kegs
drained of a vintage Burgundy close to
the shade of boiled crabs long since gone
from here

Petersburg's the penalty for those unjustly
banished, imprisoned, despised.
For sorrow, all that strength an empathy for
injustice has deprived him of!  All those times
in reading the Bible he's felt the moonlight
gleaming in his lungs

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



CORDELIA

There are no more tears.  Snow etches new lots
in millimetric paper, and the sower won't pause
to probe a plowed field for lightness and depth.  I know
that's when your pain comes awake and the budding white bulbs
shudder in a chilling wind, Cordelia.

There are no tears left.  The rising dawn of autumn's around the corner:
chamberlains afflicted with the king's childhood.  You're seeing
spiders grow short-winded from climbing the cornices, the shadows
of hounds pick up in their pace along the walls;  the body alone
tends equal guard over solitary exile and its adjoining salt of tears.

There are no more tears.  And the book clamors off whitely:
a higher power restores the crown to its daughter
who's acquired a taste for rationed salt.  And the reviving storm
reels on:  innocence, simplicity, truth all rejoin
the realm as it they'd never been gone.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



SOMEWHERE, BEYOND REACH IN THE HIGHLANDS

the newspaper vendor's a stranger, each morning singing
his prayer to a pouch stuffed with Chicago Tribunes
on old Halsted Street, where two black people are glued
to the wall in their sleep, blissfully sucking the sun's
teat on an impossibly long and humid Wednesday morning

where do I make that turn that gets me home,
growing in some morning hideout where no salt gnaws
a drifter's dreams, where a strict border failed to arrest the dawn
that inevitably left the young suburb flooded, easy to see through,
yet still falls like an albatross, scratching at glass in the fog

a scar-marked drunk black man takes in the park analytically
from his Cabrini dugout:  the summer, sweat, smoke,
his half-drunk beer, and it's a far drunker, but flashing
arrow of sunlight breaks glass, and it's a stainless
city tower I keep climbing higher and higher

here it is, the river-gull's nest, clear of the fog
and I can see far off, somewhere in the Highlands beyond reach,
the wind splittering grain fields in the heat and thousands
of empty watermills starting to turn like crazy, sensing
that I'm really there with them across the many icy miles

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



ARCHEOLOGY OF MEMORIES

While fruits in a blind still-life are waiting for moist lips,
the rooms and walls, wine and hunger, thirst
and rain, all merge into one: it's the oxidation of
an everyday morning as it becomes the exponent in opening
consciousness, and the voice in box-windows of a daily
to survive a torrent intolerant of dates. 

But the sand won't give up any tracks: early gulls
toss above watery thresholds, bending the dawn
like letters erased and returning once more to pages
inscribed in blue. I know that the footsteps have to
start at the silver dock before the Gate of Dawn again,
at the grubby palaces of the Sapiegas, at the clotted
pit below Antakalnis, where winter still holds and judgment
still waits and spring is dressed in clothing worn equally
the same. Where the color of the wine has changed slightly
from waiting around in the goblets, but the solitary lights have not yet
abandoned a crossroads where consciousness melts: gothic eyebrows, banked
snow, blue dress, wine and breakfast at the same basement
locale. And then I'd try to find at least one
single footprint from the summer by the Cathedral, back
ten years, one single glance the sidewalk or store-windows
may have retained. And then the irrepressible
grammar of a diary (lips moistened) would align with reality
(still life) as another autumn returns to the pages of consciousness.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



REMEMBERING HAMLET

treachery and intrigue; a folded homeless newspaper
the wind takes through the park, a scoop of honey on a plate left for bees
already long asleep: January leaves your mouth dry,
and a far-off blues, like news a palm reader's surmised,
quivers somewhere to the East, where pansies stretch pallid 

the sea broke down winter's restraint, now trickling easy
as a happy tear from the woman who has found the husband she's waited for
with her forehead pale, pupils widened, hands
scrubbed clean and properly crossed in the parish hall,
where the dove flew in like the hand of God touching your  head on its crown 

everything, though, is oddly prolonged: the frost keeps a crush on language,
a hoard of spiders in dunes filled with cooled tears:
wherever you are, if only I knew I'd be staring, rapt in that direction
like the good Lord from the chapel's tall column, all the way up to
your childhood, my dear one; but for the treachery and intrigue 

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



SMALL PIECE FOR SNOW VIOLIN

I 

Now the heirs of winter grip your hand, you won't have time. Where autumn's a blank
postscript, with black gas masks settled into hives, the four slopes
of the rooftop drinking moonlight will leave no place for the swarming bees to return to: shoreline
security will keep a stray beam from entering. Fingers will fail to get through to
autumn in the woods by chance. Joy of being in two places at once keeps knocking at the stray rowboat.
Is there anyone who knows this? Yet real chill steps up in an effort to surpass
the way this sturdy sax player tries his waiting audience to a resolved legato
that floods tunnels, Greek towns, a longing legato, snuffing
a blind inner-city seabird legato, that offers you absolution.
Winter moves are jagged, like floating on a sea of glass:
John Coltrane, Joe Henderson, David Sandborn. 


II

Moonlight shines on naked clay. A shroud is laid out, but the frost manuscripts draw no ink from evening wings to finish
the last sentence: a sullen perspective of salt footprints gleam in.
Past there runs the lake, then meadows, a feast of rowboats. Glinting chains
are oppressive; not one oar will reach spring without being chained,
nailed down, or totally done in. Not one will reach the outstretched hand.
Maybe Jean Luc Ponty. But a shower of arrows has stung St. Sebastian again, so
it's no time to choose what's not meant to be. Legato drives us. Anonymous
keeps playing on the subway platform, and names announcing summer flicker through his
main theme between passing trains just like his temples
with the sun powerless to help out. If you make the climb, you'll reach a city
no longer foreign to you. The windy city an ivy of sunsets
has overgrown. 

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



ELEGY FOR AN UPCOMING BIRTHDAY

Sleep has the shapes of melting candles, I tell you,
yet how life's fingers shake in the mournful September
procession. An everlasting gulp of death rinses prayer from
lips that say it over in a steady stream. It's not worth
grieving, when hope grandly surges, having dimmed the shabby

suburbs and a sullen city crowding the park on a September
Sunday. Not worth grieving, whenever sadness draws a brimming
handful of honey dark as blood from your veins. Not worth
grieving, whenever the smudged drinkers, back after nightfall,
stains of exhaustion, deep pain, and the power of wine in their eyes,

still keep up a long struggle with the sleep ripening in those rooms.
A dried-out dry rain left its trace on the windows tonight, one
you should easily overcome, but can you suppress the phosphorescent
edge that separates us from childhood: open wells into which
upon a time a dainty ladder would lower the played-out sun, dissolute

grass invading the tombstones to squirm between commemorative
letters that absolve no one ever. For love's wound is an ardent
freak lightning that's cracked the vault on a brash solitude of blue,
a shaky voice by which words ripen to risk. Are there still any
mountains or rivers no one has laid claim to before, inside you? I would

like to get across under cover of pre-dawn banks, pluck the unfamiliar
eternal berry and leave it for the fingers of dusk in a tree-hive the bees abandoned.
Sleep resembles death, but love too, even more so, ripening into
morning. Get up early and you'll get to see the sun's vibrant stream
rinse nature to a brightness, the wakened doves

fold their wings for one more day, and the marsh-marigolds on their knees
saying a rosary to the wind that stalks the shoreline for the first and only
sail to rise on the open lake. Wake up, and you'll see how the frailest bit of sea-
sand calls for God, how a storm wells up in the suburbs, and the leaflets torn
from the calendar scatter and fall, scatter and fall

with every last thing we can come to grasp here and now, and that never
alters. Get up early, and you'll get to see love conquer
death, the ripening sun shred grey moonlight shrouds,
the deafmute abruptly regain consciousness, having slept on a parkbench all night.
You'll see the dimming moon spoor animal tracks back.

I tell you this: sleep has the shapes of melting candles, but they
revive abruptly, full of unexpected splendor, and without clout.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



* * *

fingers slide along old names of waterways as I
try to feel currents and forms for their former power,
look into the resplendence of mansions long gone,
dissipated across the quick surfaces of dammed-up ponds,
sedges that used to sway massive gatherings of waters

as an overexposed photograph at first has
nothing showing, with a purpose only to be guessed at
inside the black contours, as faces for the figures (how
perfectly they sway in the waves, with no thought for
the future which makes no concession to anyone)

but consciousness intrudes and exposes all faults:
the stale pond encrusted to blindness over half a century,
erotic burnout, stains the rowboats left behind in the worn
grass; with nothing there, except for old names of waterways
lead-pressed into paper that lacks any watermark

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



HURRICANE

the sky becomes an eye studying itself
and the housetops fail to hold on:
the solitary morning jogger rushes
upward, where the sky foams
and a sky-blue eagle soars

drip-dried TV screens are throbbing
in despair, the girl's cheek is
moist, a bloody tear
crowns the fiesta of the lost,
and you are nowhere to be found

there are no erogenous zones, no naive
dreamworks to walk the ocean
shoreline, no thickened betrayal
beating against the seven o'clock
mirror

take a look: the sun strikes up again
like one more cigarette in a bar on the
outskirts of another city, in a different
country, along other
avenues the wind has not roughed up

and you are nowhere to be found:
the drapery flattened, live
mannequins stare at life across
a glass bay, where a city drifts by
like a vast armada deprived of mast and sail

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis

Julius Keleras was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, where he attended schools until his graduation from Vilnius University in 1987. While in school Keleras took extended lessons to develop his singing voice, and for a few years worked as an editor of publications at the Lithuanian Film Studio. In 1989 Keleras emigrated with his family to the United States, making him one of the first post-soviet period Lithuanian émigrés. In the United States Keleras lectured on Lithuanian literature at Illinois State University, and is currently engaged as the editor of a Lithuanian language weekly in New York. Keleras is the author of three books of poems.