IN THE END

the scheme of things I came into 
had me
strapped to the cobweb
of solitude and electricity
being shaken as though a moth
had latched on jerking
till my fingertips groped
the switch 
and I turned
myself off
so the next
one in could
kiss my forehead
and incorporate me
in the inventory
of inanimate 
objects

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



HEAVY DAWN

I waited and waited
wringing my hands over the white marble
I was so full of hope
for the red to come up
I went around every newborn
peering into the calf's red eye
started talking to a star
I myself was the star
issuing in response from the lips of redness
with flowers in ashheap dumps
waiting and waiting
so full of hope
that now it's now
goldfish fountains
the slendernecked redness
in a weasel's morning red fangs

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



* * *

To plunge back deep, like a fish,
Crouch in the dark, call down a fiery rain
And end within a shade of being
Left with no more to desire,

Set myself off through words, in oblivion
Dam up the dead-end on what's happened,
Meet up again, as night with night
In fate's amalgam with Medusa's stare,

And then swim free of curved mirrors
The unreal bear-traps, purgatories
And pull up close to your shoulders
By piercing the resistance of glass.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



DECREE

I await a decree
from the armored
fairy
where I lie on the lake
bottom
and shinybright leisure
craft
carelessly ruin
my day-off
with girls in
loose navy togs
laughing as they 
wash their feet right above my head

but there will be
a fairy armed with a machinegun
coming and soon
transforming the grass
will scatter the flocks
then all the good fairy tales
will be shot

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



JUDGMENT DAY

This day the green, lifeless whispers of a sea
Give rise to:  we shall not come by it,
Like a drop of joy over frayed currency,
Nor pour for ourselves from a green bottle,
Nor haul it drunk over hard rocks,
Because this day, from having torched the dumps,
Sets off a siren's wail in your doorway.

The day, pure as conscience or ice, has
a red glance to unlock side streets
And wake autumn's sweeper from his bench
To glance at the clock.  And if the authorities allow
The kiosk to be unlocked at noon, it will invite
Us to drink foaming beer in there, except
This day will not go on to wait for us.

Like a wife, brimming with complaints,
It will abandon souls in torment from cirrhosis,
Children who bear debts in their eyes.  They'll try
To hold it back by its glowing garb,
But as the last stroke goes echoing off,
It's sure to abandon them.
We'll be there, awaiting trial
Until the oceans wash it all away.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



ROVING CIRCUS

Mark my words, Harlequin.
While the scene had you dangling from a rope
Declaiming liberty, equality, fraternity
One afflicted with the plague
Joined the audience, unobserved.

Having vastly outdistanced
Relics and war remains
And kept clear of stray bullets
To avoid medic and stockade,
The marked body made an entrance
So whoever touched it would be sure
To die on breathing the germs
Of incipient decomposition from its mouth.
So the flowers you intend for Columbine
Turn out to be fake, the poodle's
Stuffed, the strings can't keep
From jerking and snagging in the players' hands.
While everyone followed the action on stage, no one saw
Death tag the weak spots
With crosses, disintegration
Lower its probes into each couple, maybe
To define our whole age, in so doing,
From the plaza monuments
Out to border garrisons.

I only know what comes next.
The sound-board operator with the swollen calves
Was crawling for the water faucet
When he upset the campstools and paragraphs,
His ex-boxer's knuckles
Pounding away at a mildewing life.
Five minutes after his death
The neighbors had his house ringed
In firemen's hats, then doused
With gas and ignited, as if
Fire could purge anyone of life.

This agent being the one hundred twenty-sixth victim
To have died that week, the epidemic
Tightened its circle with an inhuman force,
Coming to bump off your manager, along with
Any future you had, Harlequin. All public shows
Were now banned, convergence
Of more than five persons in open assembly
Treated as constituting treason to the state.
While vultures and cats
Roamed the vacant city
Among seltzer dispensers,
Stacks of dirty dishes, all the paraphernalia
That accompanies a touring troupe of artists
Dashed to smithereens, harvests went rotting
In the grainfields, like suicides
Whose eyes ravens have pecked out,
Like a poetry
Beyond any commentary.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



ANCIENT DAYS


The pyramid slopes rise
Higher and higher, a walled
Death-proof edifice for Pharaoh's
Retreat into non-existence,
As the desert comes closing in
And the sea deepens its green.

Trailing away behind the camels
A whole nation of bowed backs
Slouches toward the flattened
Sterile slab of its ruler's chest,
While beyond the sea
Antiquity's lightning flashes
Its colonnades and facades,
And among the olivetrees in the market
Socrates haggles with a Jew
Over a fat Athenian goose.

The poem glorifying gods and heroes
Keeps getting longer.
There's our distinguished author now
Worrying over the last line
Of his dramatic text,
While his wife's non-Euclidian mind's
The wrath of Ra,
Chasing him naked from home
And country.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



PROLOGUE

a blotter of silence
carpets the ground around the acropolis
for worshippers hardening into objects over the years

easy for me to fall and just as easy to rise
a winged reptile nearing the waterfall
but I won't lie to you: I am lucky

you've opened your imagination and can say
time's set to a commonsense downtrend
and everything else has a healthy overabundance

it’s thanks to you I’m a part of this world
a holy place all gravitate to
even though coordinates are lacking

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis

Having completed the Kaunas Technical Institute in 1973, Gintaras Patackas turned to poetry, where he turned away from the "quiet melancholic" poetry popular at that time, towards a wildly experimental style in which "he no longer could sink and melt peacefully into nature, and instead, reacting to the chaotic garbage heap of objects and the descending claw of worldwide dissolution, chose to rebel" (Vytautas Kubilius). Patackas has published five collections of poetry, and one novel.