THE ENCHANTED MASTER

All is forgiven you,
now you have been vanquished.

Nailed down in their crates of silence, your tools
are tumbling in oblivion.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
And now,
as if it had slipped from your hands,
a jug hovers above the depthless gorge;
when it turns the day upside down,
a swallow flies out,
with water spilling in spotted white folds,
as though giving chase.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Sometimes your past returns to the precipice;
with the wind roaring in your empty chest,
it speaks
like the snowfall of a mirror, shattered into a thousand bits.

"Here is why," you are thinking:
"every time it was another person
was my brother."

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



STUDENT OBSERVER

The clay scar on the bank turns red,
and, again, a sunset like the day before
finds a way through the poplar to flow in this plowed track,
the wind- and rain-washed cradle
a never-sleeping water moves in.

It's fall. Fire is the mainspring for this timepiece,
night's shell lifts open, and a moon drifts across
the sky; under stars configuring the water sign,
there's a man on the lip of a ditch, at dawn.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



HOUSE

I drink the milk cold, and that keeps me alive.
I know my own fault, just so you don't give it voice.
The table is white, the windowframe white; while outside,
take a look for yourself: a pillar of morning in yellow
heads across the field, away from the house, down to where
the lakes are cold, solid cold.

Soon, light sparks the children's windows too,
the way it's likely to happen even in heaven,
when, having atoned their faults down by cold lakes,
two people are eating their throat-grazing crusts,
drinking coffee and smiling: how long, so long ago
they lived there, and you lived there, too.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis

Edmondas Kelmickas was born in Klaipėda. He attended the University of Vilnius, intending to study medicine, but did not take a degree. While employed as an auto mechanic in his native city, he also organized a yacht club in that harbor town. Currently, he lives in Vilnius, where he is engaged in the business of antiques. The poems tend to have a visionary cast with a pronounced, formally baroque elaboration, achieving at their best a gripping simplicity in recognizable if disjunctive imagery.