CHRISTMAS ANGEL

My body is in heaven.

Dandruff falls out of a fiddle,
the fiddle a cicada plays,
gray from the littering cloud,
dandruff falling in scant flakes.

I hang at the very top.

And heaven's like the bald dome
of a Jew old as the world,
with glittering small lights
pinned up for the holy days.

On a sagging fir branch.

A small house of glass,
the color of green silver,
next to it hangs the small Jew
on a plucked fiddle string.

My body shudders, slow motion, the least bit.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



* * *

	For William Saroyan

We scoop up leftovers from supper
into one place, one truth,
and lo, in a year we've got
all of our sacred text.

I used to sit under a brown bear
with all its bones crushed.
Daddy, daddy, my lower jawbone
what's it good for.

Our house has red picture-windows already, all the
worse for us: that's no Atlantic outside our windows.
Who plays at carving up the sea, not the earth,
with a kitchen knife.

What, after slaughtering the plush she-bear
did you sew back up inside, without eating?
Only needles poke out from there now,
and when we finish playing there's all this
blood under our nails.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



LOOP

The cards stink of brandy
and mare's milk.
Apples of light are falling,
bumping the children asleep in the house
on their heads.

The wind collects a customs toll in minted words.
It nudges
a ball left by the barn
two yards
down the hill.

We take up playing basketball behind the woodshed
without seeing the hoop.

The ball, every once in a while, will roll into
the pond,
the strawpile,
the chicken and cow plop.

It spins and circles as if entranced
along the rim,
keeps failing to get in
to my hands
through an ever narrowing
loop.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis

Mindaugas Kvietkauskas was born in Panevėžys. He resettled early to Vilnius, where continued his schooling and took a university degree. In addition to issuing a book of his own verse, he edited the Lithuanian edition of Adam Mickiewicz's lyric poems for the bicentennial of the great Polish poet's birth. Both were published in 1998. His own is an impressive first book. Beyond declaring the manifold ambition typical of especially good beginning poets, it has a cagily persuasive, plainspoken grace.