Snare for the Wind


When thinking about poetry
I get lost between the poem and myself – who perceives it.
Is it possible to grasp the boundary between us, or not?
Poetry is like wind: it's not clear where it comes from,
It's not clear where it goes.  And it's not clear what it means.
What a strange, naive thing – a snare for the wind!
How much fabrication and cunning in the movements of the one who set it!




The Runner


The mirror's cold glass opens.
She runs through the long gallery from column to column,
Covering her eyes against the clear spring sun,
An unfamiliar wind
Flutters her hair and lifts the bright red
Silk garment, Abishag,
That bloody spring blossoming of roses is for you
(In niches angry armor morally lowers its visors),
The wind is anxious, passionately
Kissing the golden skin
Of thighs, like peaches ripening in the sun.
It is a royal wind, she runs
Down the Renaissance gallery into the center of the palace
Where her numb lover waits
Among moths immune to naphthalene, decorative
Rugs, weapons on the wall
That forgot the warmth of hands.
She runs through the sweltering swoon of summer,
Her garment tears, and her breasts break through trembling –
Their fragrance is as intoxicating as wine – and she runs
Through autumn, rustling in multicolored leaves,
The wind blows, tearing off the last
Bit of clothing, violent drops of rain
Cut her fertile belly.
She stands
Holding her breath in the cold winter moonlight,
Her bare lips blurt out something about death,
Her face is hoary with frost.  Poetically.  Abishag,
This rosy blossoming of blood is yours,
Open the door – the king
Is waiting.

Secret shadows from the candle fall onto the screen,
Servant girls with graceful gestures fill the space
Above the dark pool's arena, melancholy lotuses
Bob on the fragrant water, I –
A boy in short pants with an old wrinkled face
(Flaming eyes – all the life in this body) –
Slink through the shadows of house plants and then –
The candle flame flickers, it rises above the pool
Divinely naked and wades into the water,
Fog lifts...

It is a poetic fog.  Shadows catch the rhythm,
Everything sways and leaps, even the heaviest thoughts,
But the oval of the face touches the black surface of the water...
The candles burn out.  In the dark.
What word will penetrate here, what lips will utter it,
In whose name do I dare, alone in the dark and nameless,
To disturb the silence full of whispering and shaking?
Here is the earth.  Fog rises before morning.
It is a poetic fog.
Between the moths and naphthalene, between reality and sensation,
Nowhere or everywhere, in the veins of the runner.
The king waits.
Entrez.
She crosses the threshold
Smelling of water and pollen.
Picks up the zither.  Sounds spill in the cold.
A cool hand like a crow settles on her shoulder
And slides downward until a cool instant of eternity
Embraces the mute waist.  On the edge of the abyss.
Blued fingertips penetrate the white skin.
It is a royal cold.  Entrez.
The king crosses the threshold.




Milk and Tomatoes


she left a note: dearest
buy two bottles of milk and two
tomatoes he thought for a long time
having read the note sitting on the kitchen
stool how white milk is in a glass
creamy and white
as the skin of her face
it will flow past lips into the belly
then she will wipe herself with a white
napkin while tomatoes
are red as lips their juice
flows down the marble chin
until a white hand wipes it away
(tomatoes are so juicy!)
her eyes will shine with desire
she will be wearing a white dress
or a checked skirt 
he will definitely buy
two bottles of milk and two
tomatoes




Seaside Quartet


I could easily open my heart to my beloved.
All spoken words are cloaked with untruth,
Remembered pasts, perceived realities.
I could easily whisper everything to my beloved at the ocean's edge,
Into the small shell of her ear
Which has just cast out a pearl...
But midday draws near and a man in long robes
Says to a small boy carrying the ocean in pails
To a small hole in the sand that it is senseless, but my beloved
Answers that the waters flow in a circle and fill the living
While words...
While words also flow in a circle, my love,
Against the current.




Overtaken Fog


Her golden hair
Flames like the first sacrifice of harvest in the green fields,
And her feet glitter like sparkles.

Overtake her.  (The moment of union intoxicating –
It is the inconceivable realization of form,
The lightning-quick "yes" and the thunder
Immediately echoing away.)
Overtake her with words?

Her feet suddenly sink into the soft ground.
Her hands turn to branches.
Her gentle waist is covered by coarse bark (the present
Grows strangely between her ribs) – a laurel tree.

And the days grow brighter,
Joy penetrates the joints
Like evening fog on the river.




An Encounter at Dusk


While looking out the library window
At the dusk of winter,
The shelves suddenly open and a boy enters
Carrying a basket of apples and roses.
And the darkness thickens, thoughts tangle.
Today – he says –
A very strange thing happened to me:
I was walking down the orchard path and found myself
In a gloomy room with shelves,
Filled with rectangular slabs.
A sad man stood there looking out the window
At the dusk of winter.




A Poem About Solitary Architecture


Stiff towers in the long autumn rain
Pierce the stony sky.
Pigeons and crows find shelter there
From the city's noise.
Half-savage cats
Read the letters of rooftops and walls, swallows
Understand fully the conversations of ledges.
A cold wind walks the archways,
Fingers the pediments,
Measures the width of columns, ponders
The symbolism of plans and facades.
And throws into my eyes
The fine dust of disintegration – the only common language
That I know
And is known by the long loneliness of these buildings.




Pastorale


She comes near the water, insidiously takes off her clothes
As if not feeling the congealed stare in the rushes.
Her legs are as strong as the posts of the city's gates,
Her skin sealed tight as my prison's wall,
A brickwork of the iron of hours and fear.
Beneath the silks of leaves, among soft rocks,
I watch the quieting sea – the holy sun
Doubles in motley eyes like the breasts of a goddess
And sinks slowly into the red water of evening.

But you barely manage to go out to dance in your bodies,
Bewitchingly radiant, my tongue goes numb
And feet take root in the fascinated stones.
It is music and light, the mysterious
Brook, filling all the most noble forms
And flowing toward the side of thirst
With streams of milk and honey, it is a cloud
Whose every curl promises you
The illusion of immortality
And an easy road downward with the seeds and petals.
Moist One, Powerful One, Most Pure!




Teiresias


I – only one half of knowledge with a heavy pelvis,
With passive wisdom, holding imprisoned
Within myself a solitary man.
I define the future with words.
(That which you ask for, Hera,
Is most difficult for me to separate, because the truest thoughts
Exist on their own: they make love, reproduce, and surely
Feel pleasure.)  My ears are open
And the air is full of whispers and the roads
Full of travelers.  I – a blind woman
Along the road.  Beggars cast their seed into me.
This body is pregnant with the past, breasts heavy with the future.
Aphrodite herself distinguishes shapes, Zeus,
To bring them to union again.
You know where gender is obliterated
And you know where my real face is.
On the other side of sensation, on the other side of thought...
I do not know which.




My Grandmother's History


In the corner – aloe.
She had round-rimmed glasses.
Beneath her window a cat mewled
And dust especially liked to settle on her gramophone.
Talking about the past she would say: consummatum est
Or something else in Latin.
She especially loved one philosopher.  I think – Caligula. 
But we were so involved in this world...

When she died 
I inherited everything.
Most important – the gramophone, on which I would play
Popular songs until I went crazy,
And the cat beneath the window, in which in the evening
Sunsets glowed red, and for the first time
I experienced how old the world is.
Even before proclaiming myself divine.
And later my gramophonic mouth matured,
My thoughts cleared, and my whole body
Mewled sadly whenever its surface
Was touched by the fingers of aloe-tinged memories,
And divine dreams danced in the dust of madness –
Such sweetness!

Perhaps the world is older than my grandmother –
I said scattered among its shapes –
If the soul melted without overcoming resistance
And gives itself triumphs only at night
In erotic twilights.  And in the end
I understood how hard the road that led from my grandmother's house,
What angry god gave us our hopes and days.
And songs played on the gramophone also grew old,
Went out of style, and the cells of my body,
Having turned to dust, so dulled the needle
That in the evenings I began to drink boiled milk
And trembling with pleasure
Watched my neighbors' lives.

The hours are so deep, and if
My grandmother had sunken into them without pain
She would have much to be grateful for
To the healing properties of the aloe.




The Miracle of Wine


Then we walked inside through the fortress' low
Gates.  The rocking yard
Was full of drunken soldiers, loud women,
Worried servants.  The smell of death
And cooking food hung in the air.  Infants cried.
We turned straight into the tavern.  It was
A dark cellar with hides covering the walls.
My fiancée
Asked for supper, and a fat red-faced innkeeper
Came forward with a servant carrying a jug of wine 
And a roasting spit dripping dark liquid.
And one drop splashed on my companion
And suddenly our table was covered with ripe fruits:
Grapes
Fell into my fiancée's lap.  Thick juices
Flowed down her thighs, bread and meat appeared.
We raised our glasses for our life to come,
And while we drank, touching our foreheads and knees, 
Splashing like fish in the lakes of each other's eyes,
Bunches of grapes sprouted long stems,
Shoots wound around our legs, heavy ears
Of rye sprouted from the bread, the pig
Jumped from the serving tray squealing "hyes."
Fear cut our tendons. The feasters
Covetously stared at us with unreadable glances
But we quickly began to eat and – it seems –
Nothing happened: the spring
Night unfolded, we drew near the rocks of an unknown shore.
All around flamed torches.  Someone
Constantly asked me my name.  A few soldiers
Cocked their eyes at me, talking about something.
And when, for the last time,
I renounced myself, they surrounded us
With a circle of burning stares, a wall
Of drool-covered chins, a cupola of trembling hands...

But my beloved tosses her yellow hair
And suddenly a ship grows into the sea, terror
Widens the pupils of our eyes, wine covers the deck,
Horrible divine wine like blood of a raging bull,
Like the voice of a lion in the brambles of an overgrown ship.
They leap into the water –
Perfect fish of the flood – they explode in the shoreless sea
In all seven directions, they
Fly in fiery shuttles to the other side of the horizon
And weave a new water, and land, and sky!
Foaming torrents wash the old forms,
Things do not find names behind the suddenly dropped veil,
Hearts filled with power at the great crossroads
Fuse reality into a pearl and close themselves up inside it...

The water around boiled with fish,
The air paled with birds.
Their firm joy tore the hearts of sailors
Like young wine old casks, having carried away many harvests,
And the one that did not tear spoiled beneath stony
Arches of chests and turned to vinegar
And fell, closing the circle,
On lips that planted the vineyard seed.  They
Jumped from the ship, singing softly to mermaids:
"He who turns water to wine will have his blood
Turned to water."  And before touching
The primal mother's foaming lap
They became beings of the new world.

And the waves slowly quieted, diluting
Red streams, the current carried away the shoots.
My fiancée
Sat half-reclining, leaning against the mast,
With tousled hair, torn clothing,
With a wound under her right breast.
Blood dripped to the deck
Spattered with milt and hard-roe
Drying in the morning sun.




The Wedding Procession


While returning to town,
Near the gates, my bride suddenly stopped the procession
And asked me how a person
Is born and I answered: mistress,
Love is that third which unites two into one:
You stretch out across the dark unspoken valleys,
Heavy moonlight inundates rippled plains,
I draw near filled with the power of love,
Hair glittering in the sun shakes like a lion's mane,
And suddenly an obvious rhythm fills the stagnant body
And from the depths of darkness
Arises a terrible power, a whirlwind hissing like a serpent,
Hurls itself into the shapes of thought
And the gates crumble.
That's how a person is born and is born again...

The drums rattled and the flutes squeaked as if lashed,
Long flags waved in the towers.
The eighth gate
Opened wide and the town swallowed us like my bride's
Bottomless smile.  Grass scattered from her face.
In the coach's black corner I began to kiss her – o my
White lambkin! – but the wheel
Suddenly caught on the gate's cornerstone –
I was lifted upwards, she cast down.

Now across black water
I return to the wedding procession (everything
Which is worth singing of – is the joy of uniting),
Return through the labyrinths of nonexistence to my bride's refuge.
Ah, from two is born one – she sings quietly in the mist
In a witch's voice her heavy and tenacious wisdom,
Like collapsing earth, like gates closing in the darkness.




The Way of Flax


Sister, our days are ending, only air and earth remain,
Life returns to seed, time returns to the beginning,
Our journey is ending – across fields torn by wind
The Archer carries a bow to shoot the years' arrow into the sky.

A seed of flax I fell into the powerful beginning of spring,
A young ram, white-wooled from father Vaižgantas' hand,
Azure skies enveloped me, the Sun and Moon quickly
Locked me up with the key of time, covered me carefully with soil.
I sprouted from small truthful clothes, easily attracted
By wet and warm Žemyna's, our primal mother's, body,
Tearing asunder comfortable armor, I rose to a foreign sky;
Its storms tossed my stem, its waters washed my face.
I took a woman to wife when the time came, blooming
Blue I stood mute in the wind of dawn,
Had a throng of children, as the fertile Moon fated,
As the generous Sun warmed me and Žemyna fed me.

When Libra rose, you tore me away from my world,
From my round poor existence, embraced by roots,
And set me swaddled, feet up to the cooling firmament,
So my heart would awaken from sleep, so my thoughts would learn
To feed on sap and take root like the eternal grass.
You brushed away my family, broke the threads
That held me to my relations, opened true things to the light of my eyes.
I was retting in the moonlit pond until my soul,
Separated from my joints, readied itself to fly off with the birds.
I lay senseless in the wind which carried my sap,
Touched by fire, to the Sun, to the waters of heaven.

Sister, my suffering is ending, you have only to break
The delicate shell, which carried the frail life it enclosed,
And brush the linen's boons to the sodden soil.
Begin the great task, as the signs of eternal constellations command:
Comb the fiber neatly and spin it into the thinnest threads,
Then weave us straight into the heavens, into the greatest
Bones of worlds, into the works of the living repeating love and truth.

_____________________________________________________
Vaižgantas – the god of flax in Lithuanian mythology.
Žemyna – Lithuanian goddess of earth, soil, vegetation, and fertility.
The Sun is female and the Moon is male in Lithuanian language and mythology.




Proteus


Consciousness loses its way among the words of lies
In day's delusions and night's metaphors.
At the crossroads
I set a trap for the beast.
At night the weathervane creaked,
Someone grieving in an owl's voice
Tossed about in the spiderwebs of my thoughts.

What can I say to the man who strangles me?
What face do I reveal?  Masks like wet snow
Fall and melt on his dirty hands,
On the paws of everyday
That reek of bodies, food,
The sweat of nerves.

Tracks of a strange beast,
Ropes burst apart,
Morning dew on paper –
My face?




Midday


A light wind ripples through the wild poppy
Blossoms, brushes across my face
With the fragrance of drying straw, reminding me
Of love's promises in the shade of blooming lindens.
The clouds are like tangled bodies
On pale blue sheets...
I asked suddenly:
Midday, where is your essence?
And it answered me: in this grass among blossoming
Wild poppies in the skull of a sitting man,
In that skull are many gray cells, in those
Cells – many words, among those words – one 
Which is my essence, but no one
Knows it: not that man nor I.




Forest Duel


Legs sink to the knees in the soft snow.
Trees beneath a weight of white.
A frozen winter morning.
Suddenly, he leaps from under the bush
Into the middle of the glade.  In a flash
Swords leave their sheaths,
Cloaks fall down around the feet.
A pure ringing of metal
And our short cries quiver the air.
Snows falls from the trees.

Later – a moment of oblivion,
A delayed, lost moment,
And the shining blades slide across my neck.
Blood paints the snow.
Sleep through the artery of sleep floods the brain.
He leaves with my shield,
My symbol,
And carries my face off toward the land of the living.




Breaking Glass


When I see you walking by
Easy and short-lived
As a morning in May
And I want to call you, touch you, stop you,
Those who live with me,
Standing just over my shoulder, sigh heavily
With cold breath on my back.

And my head drops,
My voice freezes in my mouth,
The smile fades from my lips.

Only my hand, as if on its own, stutters toward you
Brushing against the flasks,
And the sound of breaking glass fills the room.

You disappear beyond the misty edge of consciousness,
Frightened by the noise,
Muse of the poetry of love.




Melancholy


She cannot rebel or protest,
Enveloped in endless dejection,
Looking through the window at the March snow, silent,
Requiring nothing from me,
As if she had died,
My soul.




Confession


I long for the days when my powerful arm grabbed
A woman by the waist and sat her on a fireblood steed
And the earth thundered beneath its light hoofs,
And the sword stood guard at my side
Ready at each blink of the eye
To protect me against attackers,
To win food for her, soft silks,
Ornaments of gold.
And no one would dare object
When I shouted: I desire!




The Cut


The cut that opens midday
Reveals the clean
Cloth of our shared existence
In which life's juices glisten,
Souls' secret conspiracies shine.
While the day's entire bustling,
In the name of shelter and food,
Power and physical love,
Is a reflection of death's kingdom
In the mirror of life.




Secret Conversations


You talk and talk, having forgotten
That you are talking with the dead.
Their words shape their faces,
Their thoughts quicken your blood,
And someone begins to talk to you
As if talking to the dead.

Horizons of the living murmur
With the monotonal drone of the sea.




The Forests' Betrothed


My lips crack and thoughts crumble 
From the heat.
A dry wind, breaking free
From a flaming sky,
Casts a cloud of pollen into my face.
Fine yellowish powder
Covers my black suit, shoes and hat.
I switch my suitcase to my left hand
And beat myself like a penitent with a bird-cherry branch
Until I approach the cottage.
Who are you? – the doorway sphinx asks,
And I answer: the forests'
Betrothed.




The Descending Swan


Into the pond's mirror
A swan descends silently
And its reflection
Perches on the bottom of evening
And its black feet
Touch the top of the water
And both swans melt
Into one.

Bending down you whisper something to me without a sound,
Then put your head on my shoulder
And disappear behind the fluttering shroud of dreams.




A Quiet Evening


Holding one another's hands
Looking into one another's eyes
We stand in the soft evening light
After a long kiss.

Suddenly a large moth
With drooping wings of lace
Glittering descended between us,
Dusting our faces with the sticky powder of its wings.
"Ah love," you say, "ah destiny!"
The whole world smells.




While Sifting Through the Pile of Slag I Find a Beer Bottle Cap


My distant brother, I see how you turn over the first container and wipe
		The cold perspiration off
			Looking ahead with a scowl.
Your mouth is getting dry, your head is pounding, your heart gallops strangely because
		Of the bottle of vodka that
			Last night flooded over you.
You pull a bottle of beer carefully out from the deep pocket of your old uniform.
		All around you loom the tall
			Mountains of this stinking slag.
You press the bottle cap with the palm of your hand, holding it firm against an oily board
		And from the bottle neck white
			Foam bubbles out in a smile.
Head tipped back and not hesitating you drink down half of the liquid savoring each gulp
		And concentrating listen
			To the changes in your gut –
To be or not to be, you deliberate and then, as the bubbles rise quickly to the surface
		You finish the remaining
			Beer and burp happily.
The bottle cap remains in the slag, and loaded into the truck
		It flies with the wind, where I
			Hold a heavy shovel up.
Rapidly motioning with it back and forth I uncover your lost and silent letter –
		The friendly smile of the sun
			Glitters in this hill of slag.




Starlings


My son asked me to construct a bird house
For a starling, and we worked together hard
All afternoon to build it right at first
And cut and planed and shaped the boards together.
And so the house outside the window here.
The starling is expecting children, whistles
Every morning on the birdhouse pole, while
I sit at my desk and write down something new 
Believing that the two of us are kin 
Whose distinct but dedicated trills and songs
Spread out through different communities
Though the meaning of our songs is probably the same.




An Epic Poet in Spring


A cold November fog covers the windows.
Even at midday
You can barely make out the letters.
In the corner rusting armor, chipped blades of swords.
The hero is laid out in the hall.  An old woman
Occasionally replaces the candles.  With arms lowered
I walk out into the sunlit garden, into spring.
Handsome young men and blossoming women
Whisper to one another in small groups.
My voice is hoarse from songs of the march
And my eyes are filled with revulsion.
What to say and to whom?
Everyone whispers about their own concerns.
The most important – nasty games of love.
Nature is engaged in its own renewal.
Words are full of indecent remarks.
"That is to say, everything is possible?"
I ask, holding before my eyes a perforated helmet
As if holding Yorick's skull.




Czech Etude


Tobacco smoke
Billows among the tables like a river
Across the stones of heads.  On a small round table
A glass of beer and cooked liver sausage.
A pale woman quietly approaches
And tugs on my sleeve...
My eyes are locked on the haunches of a waitress,
My mouth full of fatty cud, my fingers convulsively
Fondle the glass' handle, but she approaches
Once again and says: it's time
And we go out into the wet autumnal street.

Each journey is like a death
And poetry – says the young man dressed in black
In the violet rain by the door. –
You leave the cozy tavern,
Your comfortable circle of drinking friends, only to
Wake up in a cold room among scattered masks,
Torn formal wear,
Things ravaged by the whirlwind of passion,
Alongside the woman, who sleeps enigmatically,
The white oval of her face turned to the moon...
Before dawn the man gets up, lights a cigarette,
Walks across the cell, persistently looking for the door...
As the sun rises this room
Begins to look like an office,
Which could best be described by the gloomy and pedantic
Jew from Prague, Joseph K.,
And in the evening – once again a tavern
Where thick-hipped
Romantic poetesses force you to feel
Love for the world of things.

But woman is only one –
Says the young man, wiping his lips
With a fragrant handkerchief.
The one who wakes in late afternoon, stretches, gets up,
Goes out of the rib cage with predacious steps.
One like a journey
From birth to death.




War's Beginning


The beginning of every great war is beautiful: orchestras,
Snappy uniforms, the pounding of steps on the roadway
Like the pulsing of the heart
Coursing the nation's strong blood
Through the indivisible network of veins,
Shining weapons
And eyes, and a lightness beneath the heart
Which is felt by the piercing falcon
Or arrow flying toward the target, or a fist
Between intention and blow...
The beginning of every great war is beautiful.
Who at such a moment would think about war?




Periplum


Longing for a world
Not abandoned by the gods makes us dizzy
As we dissect the dream's foaming waters.
Ancient supple bodies of waves writhe beneath the keel.
The XXth century
Opens off starboard:
Great numbers of vistas that capture the eyes,
Friendly and hostile ports, dangerous cliffs,
Islands filled with tourists.

On this side gods and goddesses protect each
Of our movements, but there
The struggle for daily bread, buying and selling,
Clever usurers and politicians deep in debt,
Powerful perfidious empires,
Forbidden zones, hiding not the painful
Questions of belief and morality
But military bases with nuclear bombs,
Containers of chemical and biological weapons,
Lasers and psychotropic drugs.
We have been returning from Troy all these years,
Conquerors and the conquered,
Oppressed by a common curse.  We return
And at home discover the wiles that await us
And in nearly every port
They tell us of a new City's capitulation.

And so – the ship's crew rests on a small island
Whose name we do not know.
Ulysseans sometimes stray over to it,
Convert the signs of death's kingdom to water and food
And try to convince us that the sound mind of the enlightened age
Has forgotten its ethical principles
And has become a weapon in the sophists' hands.
But they never get on boats and never travel,
They have filled their firm continents
With fantastic lunaparks
Not suitable for living or dying.

Our ancestor was wise and so did not waste time
Deliberating if events were unfolding properly, did not impose
His measure of reality.
He searched for balance between sea
And land in his own destiny.  While the residents on shore
Are busy inheriting nations and countries
From the generation that fought the Second World War
And threaten one another again with shining weapons.

Densely populated places, beaches and harbors
Float past starboard...
But each can find for himself the balance
Between land and sea and there
Build his own beliefs.
Like our ancestor, who successfully traversed the seas,
Not avoiding curses, only retribution,
Captain Nothing.
Though we are already condemned to the sea and generously built
Cenotaphs of words on rocky promontories.
That is why, floating on this peculiar vessel,
We can feel this absurd longing for a pure world,
A gentle girlish longing,
And can hope to exchange it in some harbor
For water and food
Having paid the customs duty to usurers.




Ghosts


		Therefore when Tao is lost, there is Te.
		When Te is lost, there is kindness.
		When kindness is lost, there is justice.
		When justice is lost, there is ritual.
		Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty,
		the beginning of confusion.
			Lao Tse. Tao Te Ching, 38

Paris.
The train comes to a slow stop, blows steam,
The conductor gives the signal, rational 
Jurists shout "hoorah" – Kung Tse climbs down the stairs
Smiling mysteriously.  Then the orchestra
Lets fly in such a way that the visitor squats frightened
And scatters his principles of harmony.
It's the end of the 18th century – sentimental
Burghers, clean rivers, fields fertilized with manure...

But then the emperor
Ch'in Shih Huang Ti decides for all time
From the heights of Mo Tse's teachings
To criticize Confucius' supporters, that's why they
Are buried alive in the ground and quickly suffocate
Under the happy Empire's body –
The correction of names, the correction of lives
According to the matrices of death... Although words
Quickly swell with blood and become as sluggish
As satiated ticks.

And only the accomplices of the buried
Quickly cut the ropes and head for the mountains,
On every road on the look out for the emperor's armed horsemen. 
Donkeys carry rolls of books.
And later from Tibet we receive a note
In which the escapees, having rummaged through their brains,
Demand orators
Who explain the ritual, from aesthetic and ethical perspectives,
Punish them with physical punishments –
Twenty strokes of bamboo sticks on each sole.

The dragon is reborn from its own
Ashes.  At first so beautiful and kind,
So pure and attractive,
Swinging in the bodies of sages, having secured itself
Between the word and consciousness.
And works its way through all barriers
Like the virus of typhoid fever.
And then it is too late – bile floods
Our desolate hearts and famished teachings
Incarnate themselves in real time: at night
Black echelons begin to move from darkened stations
To nowhere, unloading the dead
Along the way like mail.  And our
(Association of Ghosts) chancellery
Doesn't manage to stamp the personal
Papers of all the spirits...


And all that is missing is one basketful
To complete the mountain
And the world rolls forward
Along its only road 
And the dead are not connected to these things,
Absolutely not connected.




An Empty House


The floor creaks sharply
As I walk through the house,
The door groans, the cuckoo,
Popping out of the rusted clock,
Sings three times into the deaf afternoon
And a pale boy
Casts an angry glance at me
From around the corner...

That's how we meet in our indivisible land –
A man from the marketplace and a lost giant –
Beneath a sun setting into dust.
A rock like a bolt of lightning
Cuts the thick air, and slain I fall
Face down into my forefather's cold ashes.

An empty house.  On the window sill
A vase with the hyacinth
Of my pagan soul.  The spring wind
Suddenly blows in through the broken window
And stirs the ashes in the hearth.




Sunrise


God's face illuminates our
Quieting souls.  Flames and flags cast
Reflections on the soldiers' faces.  The weapons' blades
Gleam, polished during long hours of night.
Restive horses trample in place.  The nomads'
Wedge is directed at the dark lap of the forest.
But there is no death – we think leaning
On our shields that life
Roils in three worlds.
A hard road past savage lines
Of men, horses' bellies, the clanging of weapons,
The vulnerable body, past
The talk of prophets, sacred symbols, the form...
We are like dust in white
Clothing beneath the face of the rising sun
In the infinity of days – road dust.
And the Lord's foot is already lifted
And up ahead the panting of passing time
Soughs in the sacred groves.
And while
It has not set among us, while blood
Does not gush onto the bleached linen shirt,
While the heavy odor of souls,
The cry of victory and the moans of the dying
Have not yet darkened the sun,
Let's watch
How it rises.




A Yotvingian's Prayer Riding to Fight the Enemy


Lord,
Here I am, still alive, but on my way
Out of your beautiful world, on the hard road to heaven,
Riding in front of your divine spear,
Repeating the dread song of victory and death.
My father blessed me
And my mother wept over me,
My sisters led my horse to the gates, my brothers
Rode with me to the forest.
I give my breath up to your mercy
And pray you keep it in my breast as long as possible
So my spear could pierce bodies to my heart's content
And the steel of my sword could be sated.
Enemies billow like the sea, flooding our funerals.
We know: none of us will see how the Sun's
Rosy face touches the tops of the oak trees.
A thousand men
Like a fiery lance will pierce the enemy's army,
Straining muscles,
And will ride to the mountain, straight into heaven,
Followed by the souls of Crusaders, into the light,
Into the transparent light where our forefathers await us,
Where you, powerful Perkūnas,
Will look joyfully at the crowds of captives
And will laugh in a loud voice at their impotent god...
Although I do not know what place you will grant me
At your long table, or if I will
Be worthy to feast with your brave men,
I know you love your warriors, happily
Laying their heads beneath your feet,
And with a serene face you will accept our hot and intoxicating
Offering of blood, our white-faced souls,
Sacrificed to you by this earth, giving birth
To people and living things, in the place
Made holy by our lives and deeds...
Lord,
We have finished our work in the valley of the living.
We have broken the strings of life, cut the bonds of pity.
Turn us into your lightning, into the spirit of vengeance,
The whirlwind of sacred fury,
And may each of our sighs be a black gust of death!

________________________________________________
Yotvingians – an ancient Lithuanian tribe famous for its warriors.
Perkūnas – the God of thunder, war, and energy in Lithuanian mythology.




An Encounter in the Forest


The beaters and the dogs, as if in a painting,
Drink the first rays of the rising sun,
Morning, like a boar pierced by a shining spear,
Pours itself out in blood on the soft carpet of grass,
Horses snort in the grand frame of the landscape,
Birds sing.  Suddenly
The voices of brass horns carve the sky,
Dew falls from the blossoms.
We march into the forest, blades of weapons flashing,
Dizzy with the prospect of the hunt.
The invigorating forest air shrouds us 
Like an animal's final deep breath
Escaping from its foaming snout
And disappearing in our nostrils.

As we go deeper, a woman's shadow
Appears more frequently among the trees, enticing
Me to leave the hunting group...  Somewhere in the distance
The horns and hounds and sounds of the beaters quiet,
Fear begins to grip my heart.
Hundreds of threatening glances pierce the thicket of leaves,
Frightful rustling,
A raven's voice prophecying evil...
Flashes of divine beauty through consciousness 
Desiring to immortalize them dims the mind...
The air is thick with spirits...
Suddenly she sprouts in front of me,
Wearing a tunic of hides,
Žvorūna the bloody-handed, governness of the successful hunt,
Catches me by surprise, as if a child abandoned
By its mother having lost its way in the villages and fields.
My joints are fettered by terror and desire,
My hair stands on end, my eyes pop out of their sockets.
Carefully she grasps my neck with rough hands,
Her nostrils flaring, eyes flaming, breast rapidly heaving.
She growls something softly, the way predatory doves coo.
Her body is as supple as a cat's
And her womb is imperious and greedy.
She takes my seed, not thinking about the living –
They are nothing,
At this moment their lives are lived out to the end,
There is only the future tense – the egg, pierced by lightning,
There is only the future,
The next step of the sun.

_______________________________________________________
Žvorūna – the goddess of wild beasts and hunting in Lithuanian mythology




Morning Concert


The sun gushes into the littered room
Through dirty curtains.
A table splashed with beer where several naiads
Sleep draped
Among scraps of food.  A young man
Blows on a jabbering flute.  She brings over
A tub of water, puts it on the dirt floor and slowly
Begins to undress.  The music teacher
Starts to play a monotonous song.  She puts
Her left foot into the water, bends over and...
My body suddenly shivers, my face reddens,
Hot steam through the nostrils bristles the hair of those still sleeping,
The hardening forehead aches, fists turn into hooves,
A holy picture falls from the wall caught by the horn
And breaks into a thousand mirror splinters...
What did I see, God, what did I see?!
It's a miraculous sign, involuntarily and unintentionally
Opening the secrets of the world and heart,
The sources of truth and power!...
Things brighten, there is a fragrance of incense.
The head is wrapped in the stiff ringing of space...

A dog barked terrifyingly outside.
The teacher choked on a sound, 
The young man threw away the flute.
I tried to speak but the two of them
Gaped at each other and squealed like pigs.
Deer – I thought – only deer in forest valleys
Could understand the meaning of lofty words...

Then – through the door, out
Into the bright autumnal air.  Hounds
Cling to the joints.
No one
Will know – I am forced to leave my body
To the red jaws of the dogs.
Together with the instruments of speech.
Together with the will to speak.
Blood spatters the grass.
A net of curtains.
A gate of forged iron.
Time slamming shut.




Triptych with a Laughing Woman


I

A glance through the thicket of leaves scalds consciousness.
The sun in a drop of dew, the fragrance of grass,
The raven's piercing voice
Grows in significance
		becomes speech
For the fisher's frail body (beneath a cloak of ermine).
The lost carp
		leaps in the bright landscape
And drops again, leaving behind a golden glittering.

A glance through the thicket of leaves
		paralyzes the joints –
She separates herself from the trunks of trees.
From the brown-headed reeds
		that reach to her breasts.
The gold in her skin is like the gentleness
Of fruit, the air is heated with passion,
Drops of dew
		in the brown hair on her belly
Refract the shameless rays of light.

Drawing close she puts her hand
		on my chest and looks
Into my eyes the way the black eye
Of this pond stares into the depths of heaven.
And suddenly the landscape begins to tilt: the water pours
Over the banks, stipples your body... The quiet 
Fluttering of fish, a flash of gold.
It is only		
		water for washing – I assure myself –
		only water
Taking me into the luminous midday of existence,
Only living water
		(but why does a stream
Of blood writhe in it like a reddish snake?)
Only baptismal water, protecting
Against death, which hides behind every shape...
Only water,
		into which you take another step and
You flutter in the snares of the body,
Golden carp,
		fragrant wind of paradise!..


II

Sleep pours across consciousness in a sweet stream,
The sirens' song of oblivion fills my dreams,
Fish wander dizzy through coral caverns.
Your body's bottomless depths
Awaken desire, cruelty, fear, and again lull them to sleep.
In your breathing	
		full of voices like a forest on a spring morning,
In the clouded pond of your eyes
		I can't recognize the reality I've known
			for so many years...

I say something in my dream, point it out
To someone with no ears,
Later a procession of pilgrims draws near in fours
With coarse Flemish faces,
		change the decorations.
My speech begins to crack
In air filled with sensuous sighs:
		to break away!

My arms and legs
Press against the softness of a woman's back,
Stiff masculine body,
The sharp maenadic nails leave red streaks
On my belly and chest,
The tart smell of sweat fills my nostrils...

Later... Two half-circles of backs
Pressed in the soft grass, a snake
Lazily slithers from one to the other, thrusting out
Its two-pronged tongue...
Do you know that desire
When every cell
		feels itself separated
From the one loved,
Severed by a sharp sword
		and only through the power of fear
Holds within itself the fluid of life?
Do you know the body –
A single bed for a double soul?  Night
Changes to day, while this ever-deeper sadness
		transfigures the instants of joy.


III

I often watch her in the morning, until she awakens,
Brushes a strand of golden hair from her face
And looks at me with frightened distrust
And then with a mocking smile...
Later we eat breakfast,
Pouring the milk of daily conversation for each other.
And I say in sudden anger:
		Salmacis!
(Drops of coffee splatter from our cups.)
Your bewitching likeness to the daughters of dreams
Enchants me and binds me with the fetters of love
Which are woven by my two-gendered soul
From the delicate webs of oblivion!
You hide death behind your glittering smile.
Trembling
		(and now too with passion) I remember
The other mandorla-like pond,
The treacherous snares
		the gods set for us
(And now – the fear of death),
So we would be incarnated.
		Salmacis,
Who will show me the way out of you?
Doubled desires.
		Doubled speech.
She laughs loudly, head tilted back, splashing
The milky coffee on her breast.  And my
Eyes watch her
		through a veil of desire
			and my
Spirit falls asleep murmuring: they
		are only words, only words, only words.




Christmas in the Forest


As evening fell we gathered in the juniper grove,
In the deep valley.  And I was given
The gift of speech this night,
Comprehension.  We selected
A full-branched tree in a small glade.
We sniffed its smells, on its branches
Hung small apples, carrots,
Dried mushrooms.  Then raised
Our snouts to the moon and howled a half hour
Until moonlight silvered the snow
On the branches and the stars
Delivered their masks: the Evening Star –
At the very top, others – for the branches
In place of candles...  But how
To decorate the tree whose trunk
Turns into a backbone, on whose top a flower glows,
And at whose feet sleeps a serpent
Coiled into a triple ring?  How can
It be made more beautiful?  We polished our
Bloody fangs on the snow, the trees' bark,
And with the stinking warmth of our bodies
Melted the snow around it,
So out of the earth
Could crawl worms and moles,
Spiders and snakes, toads and frogs, so fish
Could swim out from underground rivers, in the end
The Serpent would slither in, would wind round
The prickly trunk proclaiming
The holidays' beginning – the birth 
Of the new sun.

Later we ran in a circle around the tree
Howling, giddy
With joy and hunger.
We ate the snow, the bark of shrubs,
Last year's leaves, and afterwards swallowed
The tree's decorations
And attacked one another...




Country Morning


Fog above the field flogs against the shore of the yard,
Like a boat lost in the fog a cow bellows,
A pail rings out somewhere like a buoy bell,
The sun attempts to tear the curtains of mist,
A dog's chain rattles quietly
As it drags across the ground, pigs
Bristle in pens, geese cackle in the yard, a rooster crows,
Sheep bleat in the garden: armies
Of voices surround the quiet peaceful house,
Waves of sound beat against the windows,
Against the old woman's eardrums.
She prays silently
And perhaps listens to the divine song
Whispered to her by her God, because after a moment
She rises resolutely and marches off to the battlefield 
With two pails...

And in this struggle wins
Her existence.




Zone


Where does it end, where does it begin?
Ventilation pipes on the flat roof drone
Like eternity.  The landing force,
As they are called, climbs
On a metal truss that holds silos of sawdust,
To the chimney extending
From the varnishing shop, reach the top
And smell the terrifying mix of odors
That the ventilator vomits into the darkened sky,
Holding on to the metal beam
With arms and legs.
They hang that way until they shake off
This world and fall in
To the zone.

The physician's assistant, cursing,
Puts casts on arms and legs,
Wipes blistered lips
And noses with stinking ointment.
The landing force, as they are called,
One by one return in
To the zone.




Civil Defense Instructions


Along the path, by threes,
Walk ladies dressed in blue uniforms,
The squad of fire fighters
Smokes, blowing thick smoke.
The Major, the leader of the Escadrille,
Lives a quiet epistolary life.
He is mentally unsound.
Everyone forgives him, even the sparrows
Chirp, hopping on the window ledge:
"We feel no hatred for you,
Major."

White sheets in the Hiroshima shrine,
Wreaths of flowers wilt, bells ring.
The Major writes letters to the world:
"Never, never again!"
(He is mentally unsound.)

The chain of assistance is ready:
Stretchers, bandages, gas masks.
Chatty tourists in Hiroshima
With temporarily spoiled attitudes
Stare at the Siamese twins and other monstrosities.

In the cities of the world demonstrators
Against war shout NO.
Ladies with gas masks
Run from right to left.
We feel no hatred
For Major Neveragain – he is not well.
The siren wails.

Kre  kre –- a raven
Flies across the sky.
Soon he will turn to nothing.




Intruders


Into the bright landscape
With blossoming plum trees drives a smoking
Jibbering bus, opens the door and shakes
Impatiently to swallow as fast as possible
Those few people in the station.
However, a girl of incoherent movements
(Not normal, in our opinion not having accepted
The uniform of consciousness we call reality)
Spreads her arms, jibs, moves off backwards.
Why is she being pushed here?  Who is this greedy monster
That forced its way into this space filled with blossoms?
Why are they forcing her to climb into its stinking jaws,
Opening up like an accordion's bellows?
While the bus
Trembles ever more nervously together with its driver
As if both were linked together with a cardan shaft,
Had a single heart and brain.
They are sated.  They're not interested in devouring
A few more people.
They lack patience, that's why the doors close
And the monster howling leaps forward
Leaving behind the girl who breathes
More easily, once more having avoided our reality,
Her mother, running after it with despair on her face
And waving the green branch of an unidentified tree,
Two or three people who wanted to let them pass,
The timid mumble of those perching in its belly,
The bright landscape with blossoming plums.




The Miracle of Blood


The village cemetery shudders as the rain begins
Wafting the fragrance of birch trees and lindens.
I hide beneath a wood-chip roof, back pressed
Against the chapel's cool boards
Turning gray from rain and sun.
Spirits gather here at night to pray.
Their priest turns invisible wine in a moldy chalice
To blood, like water after a long rain,
And gives it to his flock to drink.
It is a thick, soothing drink,
Constraining movement, pulling them
Back to their beds
To leave this world to the living
Who gather together each morning
With spades, pails, shoots of flowers
To fix that canopy...

That time, only rain rustled in the trees.
The dead slept soundly.  Five girls walked
From the village, still very young,
Each carrying a bottle of cheap fortified wine
And sitting down in the chapel
Passed a glass around circling
Like the sun.  The long rain bristled
Around them and the wine slowly
Turned to blood: their voices grew strong,
They poured out words part of no language,
Gossiped about the affairs of their neighbors,
Complained that there was not even one
Suitable lad in the village
Because vodka had soured the seed 
In their balls and it would be dangerous 
To allow such guys to make children...
They talked like middle-aged women who had seen
Only the grayest half of reality.

Some god in the dung-ruined wall
Where once an altar had stood listened
And blessed their innocent souls
And accepted their sacrifice and gave 
Them communion
Through the apple wine, which then cost
One ruble seventeen.

And when they went away, leaving
Their bottles scattered on the floor,
The spirits quickly gathered to their evening prayers,
In holy and elevated moods,
Greeting me, patting me
On the back like old friends,
As they have never done before.




A Christmas Hymn


Quietly quietly
The sun rolls down
And hangs
On the bottom branches of the World's Spruce
Touched by the waves of the ocean of night.
Rejoice darkness!
Spew forth from your jaws armies of philosophers
And divisions of theosophists!
May they weave their nets of thought
With icy fingers
The way spiders knit the dark corners
Or rise against each other armed with tridents!
May they speak to the blind
About light, trying to present it
Through formulas, may they practice magic!
While it is still their time.
Because the Sun, having rocked
In the waves of nonexistence,
Begins to rise,
And God's light shines
On all worlds!
And spiders chase after retreating darkness,
Winding in their beliefs
Torn by flashes of light,
From the indescribable radiance
Which spreads from an unearthly man's golden face,
Flaming in a lion's mane,
Who is Surya and Savitri,
Mithra, Ra, Apollo, and Jesus Christ; the radiance
That spreads from an unearthly woman's face
In a wreath of flaxen hair,
Who is the Sun Mother
Raising everything that lives.

Let us all rejoice:
Here is the family by the cradle –
An earthly father and mother,
And beasts, speaking words.
The Child was born –
The bright hope of the world,
And the power of darkness
Will not conquer His soul.

Let us all rejoice:
Here is the family at the table
Breaking bread, sharing
Life and love.
The light of their spirits is absorbed by
The ornament on the tree
And the Sun in the depths of darkness
Gathers its strength to rise.

Let us all rejoice,
Here for the birth of God,
Those whose hearts are free 
Of anger and hatred,
Whose father is God
And whose mother is Earth,
Whose brother – the world
And sister – life!

Let us rejoice, whose blood pulses
According to mathematical formulas and rational truths,
Whose minds see reality so clearly
And who explain it so academically
That they do not see themselves.
We are fortunate to have feelings
Which absorb the Sun's light
And pass it on to souls
Without disturbing the order of mind.

Let us rejoice for whom this world is a commodity,
For whom gold is god and profits more precious than truth:
Usurers counting money
Will burn less electricity.
It will be easier for
Informers and executioners
To do their work with the people!

Let us rejoice who hate
Themselves and others and God –
Unfortunate minds do not stop
The approaching Sun's light!
And this winter will pass for us,
The world will turn green
And the Child will be born for us
With eyes opened wide!

Let us all rejoice, the moral and the sinners,
Those who hold themselves moral
And those who call themselves sinners!
Let us welcome one another
Into each of our hearts
The way the Sun rises for all
Without rejecting any!

At least for a moment
Today
Let us feel the great oneness
Which even without our knowing it
Is.




Advice to the Adept


Take of the spirit, take as much as you can,
Mix it with gentlest ether
Flowing in your veins.
You will get a soul, which you will inspire into matter.
Do it the way God does it – bravely and obliviously.
Then before your eyes a body will be born.
It will be more radiant than Pygmalion's woman.
But you have to lay it
Without compassion on the table and embalm it –
Life will disappear on its own –
Lay it into a coffin or sarcophagus
And lower it into a grave.
Then build a monument,
Which will be the title of a poem
Or the first line.




Nihilists


One form of nihilism is Plato's
When he, as Heidegger affirms,
Sees Existence having forgotten Being.
Another nihilism is the young man's,
For whom it is the same to spit at Being
And beings as he struts into a bar
Fingering the money in his pocket
And looks at all the girls, making plans for the night,
And sitting down at a table
Discourses to the red-nosed around him 
About the vanity of the world.
Still another is the nihilism of the poet
Who understands nothing sufficiently
But who worries about saying ever more.




Epiphanies


Sometimes, while bent over at the waist
At the right angle with respect to the wall
And harmoniously resounding
With – say – the furniture in the entrance hall,
You are suddenly aware
Of all the beauty of poetry and the world,
Warm streams of wisdom penetrate into stinking nooks
And begin to wash across the compressed
Silt of mechanical perceptions...

But will you really stand
Who knows how long this way
Holding the shoe waiting to be put on?




On the Other Side of the Glass


During the night frost
rewrote the landscape
in its own hand.

*

On fresh snow
only a black cat
with a white chest.

*

The forest has sunk into itself
while under thick ice
the river trickles silently.

*

"I" – like a mountain
in the river of perception
across the ice floes.

*

It snows on the waiting
orchard brides
in beggarly bits.

*

In the bowl of the silver
pond the moon
is like a round fish
between two lovers
who swallow it with their eyes.

*

After a night rain
the garden fainted with joy,
dew in the calendula blossoms
shines with cathartic tears.

*

In the green ship
a deranged crew – the white
worm incites mutiny.

*

Across the night sky
a shrieking bird flew
from yesterday to tomorrow, from
the unknowable to the unknown.

*

And what sort of autumn is it without geese,
making their way southwestward?
Yes, and here they are –
Honk honk – barking away,
and we mark it down.

*

Leaves fall...
But first in the heart
the world passes away.

*

Pines with thin fingers
comb the fog.
Muffled church bells
fill their traces.

*

Wet tiles.  Autumn.
Convolvulus
curls back into the ground.

*

A sad November morning –
the iron gates of my eyes
open as I wake.




Players


They throw dice.  The sun stares
Reproachfully and hides behind a jagged forest.
They do not see the sun, only the numbers,
Bet
Their knowledge, beliefs, consciences,
But never win.
Because there is nothing to win:
Who needs a foreign wisdom, beliefs?
And each has sufficient conscience...
But one comes
And casts his life on the drum:
Drum  drum – the highest
Powers, drum  drum – the lowest...
Until the tumbling dice
Show nothing.




The Mechanical God


One of his essential characteristics – space and time,
Rhythm and repetition, but not nature, because in it
Nothing repeats: Earth revolves
And flies in its own direction, the time of year changes.
In nature there are no inferences, no reflecting consciousness.
It is in itself like a child in its mother's womb.
We alone understand
Everything, know our condition: there is day,
For example, and night, there is
A person's physiology and the working of farms,
There is poetry and the philosophy of being.
And absorbing all that
Is mechtheosophy.

What is he – the Mechanical God?
The enemy of the god of nature?  No, they do not know each other.
Then where is the root of duality – in consciousness or in the world?
The Mechanical God offers to call a thing
A thing and we
Agree without hesitation.
But if there is a thing there must be a not-thing.
And after a time we notice
That it is most important for him to tie a name to a thing,
Then it will be possible to deconstruct reality, to turn it into ideology,
Into panideology, because duality
Is yet another of his characteristic signs.
It is important that there not be a third –
That above the thing, its name or motion,
There not be a consciousness that unites opposites,
On which, as if on ladders of rope,
We could cleverly escape its controls,
Breaking the fetters of imagination.

Some say: God is, others – is not, and they argue.
And he, rejoicing in his own heart,
Establishes a few more churches and centers of atheism,
Invents television and the internet, sends
Inspiration to those creating automobile designs,
Kitchen computers and various weapons,
Discovers new branches of learning or unites several old ones,
Declares wars, arranges revolutions, blesses terrorist attacks,
But his cleverest unexpected act
Is the sincere speculation on spiritual values.
It is difficult not to admire watching
How he correctly and word-for-word multiplies
That which cannot be expressed in words.
And meanwhile bands of poets
Stand before him, hopefully extending their manuscripts,
Because his lips are made of letters, and with every eye blink
Kiss the face of white paper –
Xerox or newsprint or offset –
In all the languages of Babel.
He speaks to us in black graphite footprints
And in the imperfect but wise labyrinth of language.
He tempts us to believe
That in the beginning was the word, and the word
Was God because it was with God.

His voice is changed somewhat
By the means of telecommunication.
He never – and to no one – speaks directly.
And how will you speak without words
Without signs,
If even the most perfect language distorts thought?

The unresolvable conflict between two equal forces
And ostentatious symbolism –
This is the epitome of mechanical art!
Most important – to feel that everything is taking place
Not in us but somewhere else.
We do not change as we create
Or as we contemplate our creations.
Then we are responsible for nothing.
We receive information and refine it.
In the best case
In art we recognize our own dreams.
"The purpose of our life is to create poetry!"
Say the poets of the Mechanical God,
But creativity has long since had no meaning for them.

Throughout time in the entire world
The Mechanical God has had many worshippers.
I do not know one
Who has not made offerings to him.
There are only those who do not follow the first commandment
"You will have no other gods before me!"
Perhaps some hermits in distant mountains
Are a little more independent...
But even they, as they left,
Used his secret cunning ruses.

What does the Mechanical God dislike?
Most of all he dislikes the heroic spirit,
Light as a spider web in autumn,
Which still knows how to love and laugh,
Which does not tie itself down and does not affirm
And does not fear death,
From which there is nothing to take in this world
And nothing to give,
Which calls a thing a thing but understands being,
Which worships him like a god but does not serve him,
Which works in his fields
But does not gather the fruits of labor.

What does the Mechanical God love?
Most of all he loves those who know
Everything about themselves and the world,
Who have names for everything and understand their value,
Who identify completely
With their work, become dependent
On its fruits and are afraid of death,
For whom "to love" means "to have"
Who weep and laugh without feeling 
What they are doing, who live
For the future, and sensing the end of their time
Curse the world,
Who passionately and unmovingly
Believe in some writing or name
But do not transcend their own consciousness, do not escape
The snares of their god,
Deny his existence and ridicule him
But in their hearts cherish
Love for themselves and in that way strike
The very meaning: in their hearts lives
The Mechanical God.

For those who wish to worship 
The Mechanical God in the future, let me add:
It is not necessary, even dangerous, to pray to him,
To fulfill rituals and similar things.
It is enough to love yourself and things,
To enjoy a life of comfort, to adapt your own morality
To the prevailing attitudes,
To live like everyone else, but only a little better,
To worry about tomorrow but not too many tomorrows,
Not to believe in the favor of gods
But to try to grab ever more
Of this world's wealth
Because those are the gifts of the Mechanical God.

And even now he generously guides
The pencil of the one writing these lines
And radiates with satisfaction.




The Girl and the Unicorn


Clear eyed, muzzle of the most precious velvet,
He lays his head on her lap.  Graceful fingers
Sink slowly into the silken mane.

In the pleasant bower of the world
Among roses and cypress tress
Under a canopy of lilies.

Pain stitches her side,
The angel's thunderous voice
Overwhelms the drowsy heart – 

A suspended bridge to the highest heights.




Spider


My heart – like a tuft
In the spider's belly.
Unwinding a resilient thread
From which I knit a net around you, my love,
And sit cowering in the brambles of my body
Until the rapacious retinas of my eyes quiver,
Touched by the thing I desire,
And while attacking my victim I realize that
It's only my own shadow.




For the Departing


You will not lose your way in the forest of life –
The mother of beasts 
Will lead you through the warm brambles
Along gentle moaning valleys.

Do not fear if the air grows thick,
The bitter fragrance of the forest 
Fills your lungs and the earth
Pulses and rocks beneath your feet.

You will not lose your way in the forest of night –
A woman dressed in black
But with a light heart will meet
You at the border of life

And will take you down the beasts' path
Through hot, abundant springs,
Through warehouses of empty souls
To the new and welcoming shore.




Raise the Mast, Carpenters!


A cracked boat shell –
Isn't it the one Gilgamesh used
To travel to that other shore,

To the land without time,
To the eternity of signs
Of a stiffened bolt of lightning?

Boards rot in the sand,
Speech and the soul die
In the valley of indecision.

The tree of language
Awaits the sap of our life,
The sails await our breathing.

Raise the mast, carpenters!
They return from there as kings
With fruits made of diamonds.




Two Ways


There is the way of the sage and the warrior's way.  The first
Leads down viscous and erroneous
Quagmires of the knowledge of truth
Endlessly litigated with gods.
When a decision is made to act
It is unclear who determines the way –
The sage or the merchant.
Sometimes clearly it is the merchant who chooses
In the name or bearing the name of the sage.
Where this path leads,
I do not know.

The warrior's way stretches through gardens of virtue,
On the blade of a solitary truth.
It is the way of will and not of knowledge.
The soul is not soiled on it,
There is no need to choose.
Where this road leads
I also do not know.
Both disappear behind the cemetery's hill.

There is also the way of the merchant,
Which we are following.




Ave, Caesar


My poor body.  Joints
Are sprained, skin hacked by rods, fetters
Cut deeply into muscles.  But this suffering is ending.
We are already being driven into the pen where hungry lions
And tigers will soon be loosed.  They will tear us apart,
Will set our souls free like doves into the azure sky.
Ave, Caesar, hail god, from God
(As the small Jew said,
Our fire-eyed apostle) having received the power
To judge and sentence us to death.  I was born
In Thessaly, that's why I have some skill in understanding
Hidden matters.  I entered that sect of new-believers
Out of despair, thinking
That Christ's truth might take root in the world
And would manage to change it for the better.  At least reading
Their ancient writings such a hope unfolds.
In any event, I really had nothing to choose.  For now they are
Growing, need deaths and executions, martyrs and torturers,
Judges and perpetrators, whom they will create
With your hands, Caesar, in the eyes of this crowd,
Which will slowly be brutalized along with your lions.
I have never before felt so alone
And so free.  Kingdoms or congregations of believers –
Only a sheet hiding a man's great loneliness
In the context of Being.  The first says it defends the body,
The second – the soul, but a man's life must
Conform to Being's form.  All of our
Spiritual and intellectual strengths strive to recognize it,
Strive to come to believe, persuade ourselves,
That the form revealed to us is real...
I am not convinced, though this is not disbelief,
That the form of Being is the same for all people
And that you and I, Caesar, have been fated the same road.
I simply comprehend time, which has passed since my baptism,
As my conscious "yes," that's why I am freeing myself
From my body, whose customs are abundantly clear.
We are both tied together, Caesar, only you are at the other 
End of the chain.  My throat will be torn open
By the beasts of the sun god, the Mithra-faced lion
With the golden flaming mane.
And our Son of Man
Sooner or later will have to put on that face.
And you, Caesar, walk down the path marked by your gods
To sunset.  Your gods are weakening
And the form of your Being is fading.  Our deaths
Suck out the juices of your life and if you consider
What to do next as you watch my body being torn apart,
The Empire will linger for a time and if
Your head spins along with the mob
As our intestines are flung about,
The people of the new religion will grab not only the form
Of my death but the form
Of your life as well and with them will strain the world's
Powers, will direct them to their own mills, their own sails.
We are both alone, while the form of Being
Is equally hidden from us both.  Leaving
You always doubt
What you had heard while alive because you don't know
The reasons why you were being told it.
That's why I think that I have to forgive you everything
And at the same time expect your forgiveness
Because death itself is forgiveness.  Ave, Caesar,
Moriturus te salutat.




Bookish Vengeance


They rode into our village
Creaking with rusted helmet visors,
Led by a gray-bearded old man in whose eyes
Were endless faith, hunger and emptiness,
And on whose chest was hammered
The sign of Saturn.  They rode to avenge
Some offense against their god.
They killed a few boys and sick people
Who tried to resist.  The men were gone.
They stopped beneath an oak tree
To catch their breaths.  Then spread through the village.

The cries of women
Fill the cupola of heaven,
The impotent anger of old men
Penetrates stones,
Eats the eyes of the gods,
Crumbles the corners of the sky.
Terror and hopelessness flood through the cottage windows.
Beneath the sacred tree
Grows a mountain of infants.
Small bloody bodies
Shudder in the powdered snow.
Thin red streams flow to the middle of the street.

Someone tried to call out to god, but the earth opened
And swallowed him.  Someone
Tried to speak but from his mouth came only the yelping of dogs.
They sat where they stood, held their heads
On hands of stone.
On the splinters of their world
As an unfamiliar wind blew through the cracks of the sky.
The morning star, lighting the road for the fugitives,
Found all the people of the village frozen
To tombstones of ice.

And the boys outside the village dug a long trench
Poking clumps of earth with spears.
Girls cooked food in their homes, concentrating on their work
As if fulfilling some ritual,
And the youngest children
Chased dogs away from the corpses with sticks
And sang something about the sun.




The Labyrinth


Suddenly the sharp air cuts into my nostrils,
The wind's cold shags stick to my body
And light blazes into my eyes like smelted
Metal.  Raising the sword
Of my voice I stand in the doorway.
A tepid current carries away the last of the blood
Washed from my body,
Mine, which does not as yet possess itself –
A small god in the world's flowering spider web
Raising his weapon to the smiling sky...

Then gray landscapes flock through the gates of my eyes,
Cities and people, rooms and words,
Like bees carrying nectar to a giant hive,
Which I will later identify with myself,
	later when it
Is full and most foreign to me.
(To a wooden frame, a regular wax construction?)
The clichés of thought and standards of conduct
Begin pushing through the five gates
Exiling emotions to undergrounds
According to the tenets of the school of perfidy and struggle...
But instead of a clear calculated world
Each one finds here his own labyrinth,
Intricate, three-storied.  A woman in a black cowl
Meets you at the entrance and behaves
As if not knowing how we intend to live
	or not wanting to know.

Stairs up and down.
Light diffusing from the top floor –
A white lily surrounded by unearthly music,
Many white rooms, radiant corridors,
Transparent blissful incoherence –
The land of gods.
Prosperity decolors the soul, moths of light
Hack the dowry of merits.
The core of memory melts and its grave
Powers waste away like an unused organ.

But it is unclear who is chasing us down the many stairs,
Keeps us from rising,
Perhaps regret for the dust of this bi-fold floor,
Dismal repetitive experiences,
Perhaps dark longings
Enveloped in cunning explanations.
Love for the labyrinth's second floor has many faces.  It is
Not only love for the sensations and the world they reflect,
It is everything that takes a person away from himself
And in him gives himself to the community
And in that way seals up the basement's solid ceiling
That protects us from darkness and destruction.
That's why love for a person, nation, mankind,
Education, church, society, art
In essence is ambiguous and (unfiltered through the self)
Does not differ from accumulation of wealth or physical pleasures.
It is the obscure dead end streets of the solar plexus 
Where each wanders among familiar decorations:
Through the unfinished shrine, puppet theater, slaughterhouse,
The courthouse with ten thousand rooms.
(It may be that even after death
These images will persecute us, having managed
To bite off at least a tiny sliver of the dead's time
With their demonic jaws
And stand in a lewd shape of reality
In front of a decaying consciousness.)  We
Do not live badly in that region of the waist,
Comfortably, mechanically, sedentarily.
Thought disturbed our peace for a long time,
Until it was castrated by logic, which convinced us
That the purpose of thought was conclusions,
Definitions,
And not the awareness
	that thought must be of the highest quality.
And if we inquire what that means
They point out divine technology.
Is that not why among those who can't overstep conclusions
Appeared so many self-intoxicating ones
Who still remember the lights of distant houses
Though they know only the artificial way, and to overcome it
Purchase tickets from death?
But it is not worth our while to pay attention
To the insignificant spoilage of decorations – seams,
Connections, cardboard leaves
Hiding holes to the bottom and top floors,
It's not necessary to listen to those who talk
About the world, of which we all are part,
It's not necessary to vindicate the erring.

I quickly pass the stairs to the basement,
	on shaking legs
Creep near the holes beckoning me to jump
Down into the soft and comfortable darkness.
Gods of the five senses live there
Ruled by the sixth, who is like a ball
Among coins with two different halves.
	The pleasures of sensation
Are linked to the body only on the middle floor.
And elsewhere their movement is incomprehensible,
	but as concretely felt
As music.  Between the perception of love, death,
And beauty.  Between paralyzing terror
And the Minotaur's intoxicating smell.
If only the ball of yarn
Of the black-robed teen, filled with visions
Of motherhood, would not lead us into the light,
Into the world.

	Where we later try to perform
Excerpts from our journeys,
But disillusioned realize
That the plays are not that good,
That a personage unexpectedly appears in each of them,
Deus ex machina announcing himself somewhere
Up high and poisoning our performance with his grumbling,
That on this floor there are not only joys but also duties
And the joys of duty are the very greatest,
Especially if they are changed to blessings.
	We imagine here
Acting out the mysteries of the top floor,
About which we comprehend little.
	Listening to the emptiness
We create rituals and perform them sincerely,
Believing that, according to the laws of magic,
Their orgasms or catharses
Will image our essences into brighter and more eternal existence.
Longing for the sense of being
Governs us more firmly than desire for life or love.
(But perhaps the underground and the top is the same floor,
Changing lighting and decorations,
The way day changes night?)
	The thread
Always brings us back to the corpse
From which power quietly gushes, fills our
Rituals and daily routines, grants the strength
To overcome for one more turn of the wheel.
	And the symbol of the center
Pulses ever stronger, rises to the light
Like a lily's black bud from the silty bottom.
And you see how all the labyrinth's floors
Stretch their erring galleries into a blossom.
And you follow the thread and see the exit
After a thousand years or tries,
In emptiness and loneliness,
In the endless corridors of time,
Where only the voiceless images of predecessors
Stare into your eyes.




Christ as Saint George


In the churchyard of Ratnyčia – a shrine
To the memory of prisoners, deportees and the dead
Was sanctified on June 14, 1989.
On one side of the shrine – Mary 
Holding on her lap Jesus taken down from the Cross,
On the other – toward the street – St. George on a steed
Stabbing into the serpent's red jaws
As if protecting the quiet churchyard
From the changeable world's noise and confusion.
A wooden miracle play
On the small shrine which, as the years pass
By people's eyes, seeps into their souls, penetrates their customs,
Spreads across the countryside: reaching Jaškonys, Naujasodis,
Latežeris, Neravai, and Švendubrė,
Expands throughout Druskininkai.

During the feast of St. George
Animals rest as if on holiday,
Dirt-covered clods of earth struggle toward green.
The serpent of Winter, pierced by a ray of Sun,
Breathing its last, sinks into the damp ground.
St. George the Green already gallops across forest clearings,
Stands to battle like Christ with the Prince of Darkness
And conquers him, and liberates the Earth's soul
From the claws of nonexistence...

And the pain-wracked souls of our brothers and sisters
Were freed by suffering and death.
Their radiant shells, having wandered so many years
Through grim reality's waste land, began to assemble
Into the White Knight who already – it's said – is galloping on.
The hoofs of the spirit steed tremble the ground in Ratnyčia,
Tremble our souls and give them the strength of the dead,
Give them their own form – the Knight,
Raising his sword, flying from right to left,
There, where in the heart's darkness the black serpent coils
And tempts us with our lives,
Keeps us from riding out this way – like St. George –
Against the serpent with red jaws, grasping the world.

Each saint, completing his Action,
Receives Christ's Radiant Face, and Christ
Is more radiant than all the faces of martyrs and saints.
So thunder-voiced George
In his glittering gold armor penetrates into the grim
Field of battle, the feathers of his helmet
Spread like the Sun's mane, the spear throbs in his hand,
In his hand thunder and lightning,
He stabs into the hot red jaws – 
		the heavens tremble,
The dark and heavy depths of Uroboros sigh heavily,
And our world begins.

Which was created by Christ himself, sitting between his Father's eyes,
To whom he sacrificed himself, threw himself like a seed
Into good and bad ground, threw himself like a grain,
Threw himself and left, leaving himself to the world.
Christ as St. George, armed with a spear,
Which gives life, and a goblet,
		filled with His blood,
Begins the life of the soul in the world and saves the soul –
A young maiden dressed in white garments,
Like the ones who received First Communion
In the Ratnyčia church.
Christ as St. George rides off into battle
Against eternal death, against the impermanence of existence,
In His Hand His Own Heart – the egg of life,
Round as our world – the embryo of the mortal –
His immortal soul, which the Creator hurls fearlessly
Like the Sun into the open mouth of darkness.

And darkness suffocates.
And death suffocates, not having overcome the grain of life,
And bodies suffocate, and decay, unravel, dissolve,
But the spirit touched their cold graves
And grass springs up along the fence, the flower timidly blossoms,
Christ rises from the grave on a clear Easter morning,
He rises with a flag like St. George, a soldier,
Marches to heaven and shows mankind the way,
Leaving behind the field of battle
To our own struggle and victory.

And on the church side – grieving Mary
With her Son on her lap, her Jesus,
Just down from the cross.  In that most difficult moment,
When His soul marches to hell, when the world of
Darkness rattles and disintegrates to its bottom.
In that most difficult moment piety remains,
The grieving mother, a mourning soul,
The soul – maternal, grieving for her children,
Dying and going off to the unknown.
In that most dangerous moment
We are required to stand again the kingdom of darkness –
It is our turn – the powers of the world watch
Us carefully and wait for our self-determination,
The spirits of light and truth bless our resolve,
Darkness breathes heavily and vomits viscous temptations,
Everyone is waiting: heaven is silent with tension,
Time stands still, space blossoms in an instant,
Earth, holding its breath, stretches beneath the steed's hoofs,
The wages of life and death are waiting,
God Himself waits in you...

- – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

I put together his ode
For the success of our victory.
Let everyone discover what miracle the tree
Holds within itself beneath the shrine's roof,
Let the news spread in my words as well,
If only they can bear the truth,
Let it ring widely throughout the land,
Let it call forth more hearts
To struggle and victory.




Apocrypha


On the road to Golgotha
Ahasuerus is still chasing the man with a cross
Away from his home, while in Jerusalem's custom's-house
Scripture's decoders already compose secret documents,
Prepare visas for the apostles,
Study life in the diaspora, strengthen
The net of agents in Rome and in the provinces.
It is essential to evaluate correctly
The Grecian spirit, the hunger in their souls,
Their dreams, repeating for millennia.
(A man is nailed to a cross.)
The world is brutal and old.  Ships of Gnosis
Abandon the exhausted civilization
And spread across the Mediterranean Sea, penetrate
Islands and seaside ports.
Reconnaissance multiplies the apocrypha
About the human nature of god.
(Guards throw lots for his cloak.)
Wise men consider the game plan
And that, which is
Outside the game, remains for the condemned,
Remains for travelers on this earth, leaving
Meekly one by one, because theirs is the kingdom of death.
A few influential
Workers have plastic surgery.
The stone removed by the builders
Is mentioned ever more often.
Candidacies of martyrs are considered.
In the beginning was Logos.




Court Case


Through the lilac bush, the thujas and shabby acacias
I glanced at the world of nature
And discovered that it is good.
My body, the grass, the cracked pears,
Autumn apples and summer cherries...
It really is good, that's why my...
And only later did I see God
In the bush filled with sunset
And He demanded I return His world to Him.
And that's why we're in court now.
The case has already reached the highest tribunal.
Everyone testifies on my behalf.
Light says, who would see me if not you?
Air says: who would breathe me if not you?
Earth says: who would walk on me if not you?
But He presents some ancient papers
That I do not know how to read.
And there is less and less time, and there, on the other side,
Other laws may be more valid...



The Jinn


     All those who distort truth and do harm to the teachings of the Church 
are the Samarian Simon Magus' apostles and disciples...  In truth –- they do not 
carry before them the name of Jesus Christ but in all manner teach us Simon's 
godlessness... pouring into the ears of the listener the Great Serpent's (Satan's), 
the primal apostate's, poison.

			   St. Irenaeus, "Adversus Haeresus"



You are mistaken, Samaelis, blind god.

Once we rode out on camels to Nag Hammadi –
I, Muhammad Ali ad-Samman, and my brothers –
To bring fertilizing silt back to our fields.
While digging it we found a clay jug sealed tightly with a cork.
I was seized by fear – I
thought a jinn was in it
But the hope to find gold lifted my pick.
Beneath the scattered fragments were thirteen papyrus
Books we brought home and piled near the hearth
In my life, mute, dreary, and stifling as the earth.
Perhaps only this metabolism is quicker: women
Sometimes used leaves for kindling.  That's how everything
Would have ended but a few weeks later Allah allowed
My brothers and me to sneak up on our father's murderer,
One Ahmed Ismail, and we then released
His despicable soul from his body, let it loose to the winds,
Chopped off his feet, hands, afterwards tore out his heart
And divided it with a knife and ate it raw the way we were taught
By the rites of vengeance, buried what remained under a juniper.
We were young and hot, were not afraid to kill and die.
The police began questioning us and we had to hide
Those books at a neighbor's.  And they began to rise slowly
In the dim light of mind where they were burned in the spirit's flames,
Washed by the water of souls, this extract was carried by blood...
Whether we found gold or freed a jinn
I didn't know for a long time and, of course, felt sorry
About the gold, which I would have raked in for them,
But later I started to connect it all to my father's
And his murderer's deaths.  Even though that spring
A great world war had ended, having spilled oceans of blood,
Having released winds of souls.  Finding me, various
People asked how and when we had found those books.
In exchange, I asked what was written in them...
And eventually understood that the murderer of the tribe's stepfather,
Dying then on the cross – was the son of the Highest Deity.
Intoxicated by his death the Archons lost their vigilance
Because, it appears, death always worked to calm them –
The spring of danger disappears: the soul leaving the world
Carries light there where their understanding does not reach.
So through the open door wisdom flooded our hearts,
And the Archons' vassals had to labor hard
Until they tangled truth, distorted his words and origin,
Created clever writings and hierarchies supported by force,
So that in the hearths of existence books and people would quietly burn,
And there would be only one truth, which they called truth.
But I still don't know who, having filled the other jug
With blood, gave it to the thirsty spirits of the desert to guard,
Whose will he was fulfilling, and who suggested the way...
Who am I, after all, and whose hand governs me,
How much free will do I have, how much truth am I allowed to know? –
I ask myself all the more often and all the more often forget to pray.

You are mistaken, Samaelis, god of the blind.


Explanations

I received a handwritten translation into English
Of this text from a Portuguese who called himself
A millionaire, though he made a living as a journalist
And looked a great deal like an antiques dealer.
I remember how, after the third gin and tonic in the littered
Bar in Seville, he began fumbling through his pockets (the TV
Was broadcasting a corrida, the one in which the famous matador
Died in the spring of 1992), until he finally found a soiled
And tightly folded piece of paper and gave it to me, saying
That he had gotten the translation from an Arab friend of his
Who worked in some museum in Cairo.
But I have no doubt whatsoever that this is an apocrypha
Even though real people and events are mentioned in it.
Muhammad Ali, a Moslem, reasons
Like a primer Gnostic who, after "A Thousand and One Nights,"
Had read some version of the "Apochryphon of John."
But I think this story is worthy of publication, so our
Reader would see by what sort of bloody sacrifices
The sweet-talked spirits of hell vomit
From their jaws, those clever, error-filled heresies.  I added
The epigraph myself, because I think it especially fits
Publication of the text in Lithuania.  Its first line
Is a quotation from one of the Nag Hammadi codex of books,
"The Essence of the Archons" and the last from "About the Origin of the World."
In both instances – it is the response of the Absolute to him who said:
"I am god, and there is no other god before me!"




The Peaceable Song


I

We rode through the black tunnel of night
By two together with ourselves, warrior. 
Meanings are confused, systems of signs imperfect,
Allusions collapse with every
Brick that's moved.  The father of things is ailing.
Those two armies...  Darkness against darkness.
Military operations give birth to ideologies
And corpses.  Stations along the way flash by.
From the platform the noisy hymn of some sect
Tumbling in through the window, tears at the car's silence –
Old longing of existence forcing its way past teeth of bone –
And there is nowhere to hide from a holy life,
From conversion, from recovery, from verbalized goodness,
Which gnaws out the eyes, eats away consciousness,
Sucks the green blood out of leaves, the red from veins,
The white from testicles, lymph canals, even washes
Milk from breasts and settles in powder
At the bottom of consciousness.  
If there is no harmony within you...
You understand who the architect of these stations is.
You understand it on your own.
I am not god, am not more sensible than you
And do not want to force you to live with my illusions.
I am only the train's engineer, whose entire wisdom –
The traffic schedule and a few well-worn handles.
I can share with you only with reluctance,
With incertitude and hesitation.  The architect
Offers everyone the same station interior
But the spirit to understand truth is given to us
By God.  We cannot pass it
One to another.  We give each other
Only truths themselves.  And perhaps are
Able to recount in some unclear way
Along which road we were able to reach them.
So many worlds have perished, which had their distinctive wisdom.
Only crumbs remain for us: random texts
With contexts, their errors, lacunae,
Dead languages, which no one knows,
But they decipher, speculate, reconstruct, interpret,
Render their thoughts in the words of a completely different time, 
Give them to builders, who quickly cement them into
Their own ideologies, imputing their own dimensions
To history, adulterating the causes of events,
Appropriating time in order to usurp a space –
The earth of souls and mother earth...
And you want to fight for them?


II

Two armies lining the path to the abode
Of your soul, one against the other, in both
Familiar faces.
It is your struggle, warrior, your holy war
From which you have nowhere to retreat.
Just do not ask me about reality and reflection,
I do not know, you will know when you fight.
Now put down your fruitless contemplations.
Watch how the sun rises mornings, how the tree's
Leaf unfolds, how the fledgling bird hammers its way
Into the place suddenly opened for it by the one just dead.
Do not allow the hydra of words and images to wind around
Your sturdy muscles and the battle-ready bow.
Beyond her open jaws gape endless
Wildernesses of demons, their armies wait
Until you forget the moment, until you hold them
As "real," until you neglect God's world
And march trustingly into the Architect's domain
Like a sacrifice festooned with flowers...
Essences are clouded, systems of signs imperfect,
Reality like a single two-sided mirror stretching all around,
With the Architect's so-called holy books,
Where everything is tangled, distorted and doubled,
That is why I have not told you to mislead your mind in them.
The road to God is simple and straight
Like the battle for which you have been born.
Everything grows clearer when we begin to act correctly.
But we set many snares
With passions and considerations,
And the clever ones set snares
Attempting to explain the harmony they never knew.
They entangle the warrior's consciousness, suck out his power,
Cast his gaze down to a tangle of sinews.
The two-faced head of communities, threatening and wronged,
Extend hands not their own into your conscience
According to the Architect's instructions.
But you have your own battle – two armies
Lining the path to your soul's abode.
Look what expanses chaos has usurped,
How wide is death's dominion!
God has destined you to struggle and overcome.
If you are not trapped in the scene-painter's snares,
If you do not become their friend or foe,
If you do not begin to count what you can win here
In this emptiness and wait for the fruits
Of the tree nourished by the sap of a different causality.


III

The father of things is ailing.  An odd calm
Fetters the heart.  The phalanxes of death draw near.  Forgive
Me these words, warrior, forgive my refusal
To reconcile both worlds – impotence
Surpasses my soul and will
I am only the train's engineer and the rails were laid long ago
And the switchmen always specify the way.
That's why it's not worth fighting for nothing
Without winning the battle inside yourself,
Without conquering the ground that would nurture the action.
There is much knowledge in the world but we each
Must begin this battle anew: sooner or later
Knowledge negates itself.
Forgive me if I speak without knowing –
Some time ago I took on this speaker's destiny
And now it's too late to withdraw.
But I lack the strength to go on.
The hope that you will do this for me remains.
Ahead everything is strange, confused, suspicious,
There are many truths and many similarities to truth.
The hero is born alone and alone leaves the battlefield
And creates his own reward.
Windmills truly can look like four-armed
Monsters.  And the opposite.  But
Mistakes are never forgiven.
Because there is no person in the chain of causes
And consequences, no one to offer forgiveness.  The action,
External and internal, means the same and
Both are followed by doubled consequences.	
If you fight for those who want to force you to fight
Their war, you will accumulate only your own faults and merits,
Which you will not return to them.
Though they promise you protection in this world
And after death...  I don't know.
I'm not sure.  I am beset by doubts,
Which I pass on to you.  It is my only
Treasure, my only wisdom.




A View of the Sea


I

At first I was surrounded by familiar ghosts, but when
Pricking my finger I paid my tribute of blood to the native spirits,
The dark and cold glass of the mirror came ajar,
Abruptly presented a view of the sea.
It spoke with clouds that slipped slowly across its face,
I do not know about what, but saw how its mood changed –
A smile fluttered here, fury foamed there.
I do not know what they said, what texts they exchanged –
Small or great, significant, inconsequential.
I did not know how to enter them or if there were others in that conversation –
The gray stones of Stella Mares, the Blessed Virgin's cathedral
With the ruins of other shrines around, measuring out
The hours with its bells, people's small houses – its pedestal...
I do not know what I can say to you, you who stopped
And looked at me quizzically as if summoned hastily
From the giddiness of your daily routine, my soul.  List facts
Distorted by expression?  Present expression
Without contents?  Express feelings,
Formulate points of view, share
The resilient coolness of envisioned bodies?


II

The ether is full of meanings and perhaps the view of the blank wall
Would open other less deceptive landscapes
To him who knows how to wait.
But the wind raised white ruffles on the sea's leaden plane
Like an experienced lover shivers his partner's skin.
They rub across sensitive surfaces as if during the Fall.
The apple opens its memory with its stiff skin:
Two folders: a man's creations and behind them the foaming sea.
I open the first: cathedral, cottages, ruins;
I open the second: the sea.  But without ships or waves,
Without mermaids diving through its frothing curls.
I try to part its surface but memory
Tells me it does not know the way into this document.
I try to penetrate the system – strange signs,
Incomprehensible numbers and relationships.  On what
Is this view founded – the eye's structure, the harmony of sensations?
On our kinship's or the programmer's contingencies?
What is known – experiences and perceptions?
Some sort of current
Flows suddenly into a shape open to it, employs it
And from somewhere lifts, as the sensations say, "truth".  And still:
Two actions – switching on and switching off,
Which, if we believe the Bible kept in the cathedral,
Enclosed deceived original man with temporality when he,
Able to choose the fruit of immortality,
Took instead from his partner's hand the programmed apple...
And now we can believe whatever we want.
Existence is established hermetically.  I close
The sea's file and folders.
Switch off the power.


III

I always wade into that same sea –
Beneath my feet my homeland's sand or the stones of a foreign shore,
Cold water cuddles me like a succubus,
The organs of thinking shrivel, the tentacles of dreams.
But I am always someone other,
Carried away, floated off, encrusted with shells
Engraved with the runes of strangest experience.
I feel how her flexible fingers open me –
The folders of sensations joined to the files of memories,
Accompanied by onomatopoetic interjections...
The touches of the wind, the tickling seagrasses, leaves.
And all this – just thoughts, meanings, words.
I would like to answer her, but – how?
Strike up a friendship with the denizens of her depths,
Which I do not see and whose language I do not know?
Sink into the truth of sensations, the essentiality of process,
Not managing and not reflecting,
Meeting on the other side of the body that unites them?..
Yes, she opened me, changed something and rendered it...
Ultimately I do not know what happened there, I must not have been present.
Then she closed me, daily routine with its names fell across
The labyrinth of my brain, words spilled from my lips.


IV

And you wade into that same sea,
Foambody beloved of the gods, paramour of swans,
Perfectly opened and radiant love!
God's invisible finger penetrates into you.
(Black?  Yes, it most probably has to be
Black and lustrous as the surface of oil.)
Penetrates you, triumphantly leaves behind in you
Its liquid semblance
Which can be deciphered only by the gentle memory of wombs,
Sorted out, apportioned in the matrices of its system...
And later they set the fruits, mature, grow strong,
Until it drips off a quill,
Opens like a flower not from this earth.
(Homer touched it with his blind man's finger,
Stesichorus went blind and then regained his sight.)
And so it is before you, Menelaeans and Pariseans,
Step into her, penetrate her, decipher her substance!
Wander through her landscapes or conceive your
Children, become poets with souls that wade in the seas!
Our hermetic world foams with impenetrable
Texts, but there remained those who in the darkness of wombs
Could read life's
Letters and give birth again to its closed forms,
There remained elements and God, and nothing changes
From the very time when nothing yet
Reflected the world.




Delayed in Ephesus


Even before arriving
I was delayed there.  Among newly-hewn marble,
In ancient time.
The mottled crowd of shadows was not at odds with my soul.
The theatrical repertoire and holiday rites,
Customs of thought and means of expression,
Childish games of love and undistorted passions suited me.
I was not close to them
Though did not feel more a stranger
Than I felt anywhere else,
So after many years, getting off the bus, one day
I set off down the main street that sloped to the library,
Along polished marble slabs pressed into the earth,
But right outside the temple of learning, eyes cast down,
I turned to the right, toward the amphitheater,
And found myself in the hetaera's quarter, where
To the city's ruler, the twenty-one-breasted, were
Offered living sacrifices:
Warm firm bodies on the cold and hard marble.
Cracks between slabs satiated with dreams,
Filled with pretentious images, which accompany
Such a simple act of impregnation.  I remained there.
Having bought counterfeit drachmas with Odysseus's ship
From a gypsy woman's dirty hand, wanting to exchange them
Into non-counterfeit experiences.  I remained there many years.
Because I had nowhere to go,
I wanted to speak, fortify myself with words, prove
Myself to the hetaeras who had pushed me aside for lack of money.
Prove what? ...  I don't know...  I just wanted them.
Voices like battles of waves banging my ear drums.
I remained there many years.
I visited the forum, the amphitheater, the stadium, and baths,
Like everyone else I sent a slave to the public toilet,
In the center of which a band played,
To warm the marble slabs with his behind
Before I arrived.  I listened to rumors
(There was no press then), slander and music.
(I was not often invited to banquets.)
Yes, I had a tongue, lips, articulated sounds,
Knew several languages.  But turned away from myself
I felt myself alone and inconsequential
In the ocean of sounds and shapes, words and sentences,
So one-sided, narrow.

The sea receded, unmoored
At least a few Renaissances and something opposite to them.
I joined them, leaving behind in Ephesus
My world view.  I visited several peaceful harbors,
Uttered and wrote down many words,
Stayed in monasteries, hired myself out for various jobs,
Participated in banquets, taking goblets of wine
With two fingers and women's soft bodies –
With both hands.
Until heavy satiety changed the pleasure of eating,
Wine clouded my vision, and women's bodies
With their smells and words destroyed my expectations
And left only emptiness in my body.
That life did not disperse my longing.
I lacked the will to walk down the path of the spirit
And I had nowhere else to go.
I was not attracted to this world of the present with its
Cultured lies, schizophrenias and complexes,
With its institutionalized religions and ideologies.
I was a stranger to it, even though I did not feel
More righteous, better, wiser than any other
Floating in the current.  So I remained there.
Though ever more often I think I'll wait here
For my last day.  Shadows, of course, will not carry out
The rites that separate my soul
From this world, will not accompany me to the other side.
Their world, this and that other, lives only in words.
Like Sunday parks that many visit
But do not live in.
Yet my soul, alas, is absolutely real
Even though it always avoided any kind of reality.




The Barbarian


And they lived long enough to see us.
They saw our pure divine sun,
Our pale moon and unrestrained fire,
Our heavy oak battering rams, spiked cudgels,
Primordially flowing blood, savage death.

Ruins of palaces, shrines,
Trisyllabic feet, strewn incoherently,
Scattered iambs.
I cannot understand their subtle allusions,
Anemic snares, winding round my thoughts
And sucking their healthy blood. They
Do not reach my sensations, do not stimulate any emotions,
Only disgust for their sweet weakness and boredom.

I confess poetry, the power rendered to words.
I, a barbarian bard, a bit weary
Of their spilling of blood, ruins and ashes.
I know – this power grows from the truth
Like an oak from red clay,
From our nature, from not thinking, not naming,
From the desire to influence but not understand,
To call forth the rain, silence the elements,
Tame epidemics...
Because truth belongs to the gods, not to the minds of poets...

And afterwards,
The furies abated and with consciousness softened
I try to tell stories about the exploits of war,
And ever more peaceful things, gathering feet,
Scattered in the grass whose roots are the first
To capture the fecundity of ashes and blood.




Suburban Pine Forests


They begin there, where orderly
Or dirty city streets end, and sometimes
They penetrate into the depths of our settlements
And encroach upon our cultivated parks.
Saturated with dust, gasoline fumes and soot,
Littered and trampled they carefully
Wash with all rainfalls and snows
And purify the air.
The city attacks them fiercely on all sides,
Cuts them off from the forests, closes them up
In fortress cauldrons, strives to destroy them
Or at least change them into parks.
They keep on patiently, growing mosses,
Scanty underbrush, building fortifications of bushes
According to their obedient and patient military knowledge.
Consistently, here and there appear mountains of refuse,
Secretly discarded by the dump trucks of the self-improving city.
Corpses are discovered – victims of violence, sad
Hanged men or other suicides.
The gloomy outcomes of varied conflicts, oppressively
Unfolding in the city's boxes – the dust of disintegrating bodies,
Fumes of diseased thoughts, the soot of souls, the refuse
Of uniformed imaginings, discarded into the subconscious,
Where drunkards roam, collectors of empty bottles,
Where maniacs primed by their secret desires wander,
Where inquisitive children prowl, and sometimes
Lovers come by chance or other residents swollen with passion,
Having nowhere else to share their stiff cravings.
The pine forests accept all that quietly, bear no testimony, do not resist,
Just gently purify the air and constantly look for the chance
To return the trash and corpses to the city
Publicly, indifferently and shockingly,
Like our own subconscious – all those insects
Swarming in the boxes of the city,
Thinking, loving, quarreling, attacking
Them with their streets, houses and cemeteries.




Unexpected Guests


It is for you, unexpected guests,
Connected only by semantic features,
That I dedicate these poor lines.

You did not manage to outstay your welcome,
Take over our ideas and texts
And change anything with your will.

You, illegitimate child of fairy tales,
Born in secret, were released into the river in a box
Packed together with the most beautiful things.

You, invalid, wounded while forcing
Your way through the gates of this world,
Were left by your lawful parents in the room's box
As they ran away through the window into night
On a laboring river of darkness,
Carrying off only things.

And you, stranger,
Discovered in a rubbish heap, in a polyethylene bag,
With an umbilical cord wrapped round your neck...

You all returned there from where you chanced to come
Or wandered off to some other place.  And if it came to be
That we are destined to take this excursion only once
It would be difficult to reconcile
The absurdity.




The Necessities of a Diary


Because afterwards everything intertwines, merges,
Great imaginings
Crumble into a thousand pieces, tiny homunculi,
Watching your dreams and meditations.
Though calendar time never coincides
With a soul's history, it alone
Links it with "history."
So if you can find no other way 
To protect yourselves against diminishment,
Ever-shorter years, blunting sensations, longing,
From that which is given too late, when desire
Comes only from habit, remembering past desires,
And you are not even sure if you ever really
Had them, or if they were in fact
The rats of mangy consciousness
Spawned by poor reading and banal ideas, then
You open your diary
And there read your old lies
To yourself, and connecting them to world history,
Create new truths, enormous contemplations.
Because there are as many minds
As sands on the ocean's shore – they
Are carved by the wind and tossed by the waves
And do not know why.




Evening Music


A tranquil thicket of alders
Near the black-bottomed brook, a rotted
Bench, a trash can.  An old man
From the shelter comes here evenings, looks around,
Pulls out a harmonica
And plays "God save the king!"




About Starlings Ten Years Later


Remember – I wrote about a starling
Whistling outside the window?  And now
Every spring it repeats itself
Even though the bird house is caked with droppings.
I too have written a sufficient number of lines
And besides, the community's ear has changed.
It began to seem to me that the bird,
Singing the same songs all these years,
Knows how to sing without annoying,
But the poet, setting out the same words
In ever different ways, bores
Even himself.  Besides, I have a home,
Became a father long ago –
So what should I call out for,
To what should I surrender my heart?
Nature falls asleep in my veins, spring
Becomes ever more like winter.
Our songs are different – his soars away
But mine lags behind the meaning
That the Creator gives to his feathered ones.




Sunfish Heads


Sunfish lose their heads
Before Christmas Eve dinner,
Their bodies lie on a dish on the table,
Dejectedly pressed together,
And cannot speak, have no means to.
At the same time their mouths slide from a damp
Slimy plastic bag
And fall into the snow.  A jay
Lands on a nearby tree
From an empty sky.

And it's not clear who will sow their milt,
Who will fertilize their roe,
Who will carry our souls
To paradises or embryos...




The Fisher Hawk


Water carries away sadness,
Air takes away desire.
The grass on the streambed is like my rambling dreams.
The reflection of a bird floats past on the surface.
The season of blossoming hunger.
Fish jump from the water into another
World and grab winged insects,
The fish hawk
Lies in wait for them on the fragrant air.
I dive into the depths:
Rambling dreams, swaying, billowing...
To look for food?




Nasturtium


I remember them growing in the gardens of my childhood
Beneath rotting and unclean windows –
Frog-green leaves, slender shoots,
Stinking, as if diseased, blossoms –
Seeming to propagate from an unknown, strange world
Which was not yet within me,
Which revealed itself only in accidental signs.
Having shed their blossoms, they shamefully
Knotted together
Amazingly ugly bubbles
And closed up their seeds in them –
Creatures of that hell which was then only gathering up in me
And which later flourished
In flowers of evil.




Home


Long-walked upon paths retrieve the feet,
Things in memory renew the imprints of fingers.
Your comfortable body and wise soul...
The pillows of recollections slowly wane
Beneath my hands, shadows
Slip out from between us like secret
Love letters from long-unread books,
Smiles close, and the reservoirs of eyes, from which
I just emerged, overgrow with weeds.
Fingers move across the familiar keyboard
And make mistakes as if touching the one
Across which they wandered all month.




Apples


In trolley number 5 on the last seat
Next to a dozing old man from Gerontion,
A bag of red apples on my lap.  Not for Paris,
Not for Alexander, but for my children, my family.
Unwittingly the apples of my breasts pulsate with juices.
The young man near the door across from me on the step,
Fixing his gaze on the apples, the juices, the reward,
Gathers, it seems, something from the shadows of his soul.
Between his legs the root of life begins to grow,
The uncontrollable horn stiffens, and he reddens in shame.
The old man, seeing that, wakes and begins to chuckle.
The young man, flustered, gets off at the first stop.
The old man continues chuckling, my body grows numb,
His juices begin to rage.  I try to get out
At the next stop but my forgotten bag
Falls off my lap and the red apples spill out.
Undelivered reward.  The old man laughs
And begins picking up the apples.  Not for Alexander,
Not for Paris, but for my children, my family.  I get off.
Back past the old voices, past the faces of Achivi.
May the gods send him his soul's most beautiful woman.




Rolling


As a child I loved to play
in the street rolling a bicycle's
wheel-rim with a stick.

A poor toy.
I remember that symbols
didn't interest me then.

Later, when I began to link
the straight and the circular
with images of time,
I contrived many meanings.

The world is round, and the individual,
stories and poetries.
Only history and truth are straight.

A woman is round
like wisdom, while the phallus is straight
like a slave's consciousness.

Perhaps that is why religions
propped up by history
so dislike and fear women.

I forgot this game long ago
though god keeps rolling
the world on the street of my childhood
with something that looks like a phallus.




Hades Kidnaps Persephone


A fly bangs against the glass searching for a warm crack,
A saw's teeth greedily cling to wood,
Hades seizes Persephone in his arms, panting
Heavily he lifts her fat bottom off the ground,
The black harnessed steeds wait
And dig the soil with their hooves, fat-thighed nymphs
Wring their hands, bang against the cooling air, weep
Like saws.  Carelessly flowing
Time congeals into forms, life – into its signs,
Water – into flakes of snow, experiences – into allusions,
With which poetry is strewn, describing the bright landscape 
Of life, diffusing the scent of Hades.




Aging Gods


Shortness of breath constricts my chest with my first step.
I shamefully hide my tenacious radiant light
Behind a floating screen of eiderdown.
Branches leap back into arms, the trunk rounds back into a waist
Gracefully enclosed in the firm half-circles of maidenly hips.
The coarse bark is replaced by smooth skin,
Leaves tatter into hair and stick to the head and belly, 
Mounds of breasts rise, shoulders curve,
Legs move ever more slowly
Until they finally stop.  The chest heaves quickly.
The scene, becoming image: the persecutor has vanished.
I throw the laurel wreath under her feet – the contest is over,
Victories confer no joy, flutes fall silent,
Bend and break loose from lips.
Her perfect proportions captivate all who see her.
The world's image fades on the screen.



St. Elizabeth's Hospital


	             for Craig Czury
                Our dynasty came because of a great sensibility.
		                               Ezra Pound, Canto 85

Across the Anacostia River, among the trees,
St. Elizabeth slices a round cake
With a long shining knife and politely serves it
To the students of the poetry t-group waiting in line.
Their arms are bound along their bodies to the elbow,
Their eyes are as round as a cake sun,
They stretch oddly as they eat: it is the destiny
Of poetry to repair consciousnesses and worlds. Suddenly
A telephone rings, calling for St. Elizabeth,
She hands over the knife and asks me to continue slicing.
As the long blade travels from one hand to the other
The sun bounces off and flashes in their eyes			
Chopping up their roundness like the knife			
The cake. The world splinters
Into myriad fragments and for a moment
Congeals before crumbling.  I	

		Our dynasty came
			because of a great sensibility.
		After all the pavilions of our palaces
			I now look through John Howard's window
		In the shadow of leafless trees
			into the new age across the river.
		Our minds were somewhere else
			when the gates opened.
		Our dynasty rested upon a strict hierarchy
			contemplating beauty.
		The walls dissolved years ago
			as I listened to forbidden places.
		Our dynasty established order in poetry
			and gushed through the edges of form.
		Inner voice?  Each of us got many
			inner voices. Which would you like to hear?
		Our dynasty was hospitalised
			because of its great faith.
		The new world injected us with tranquilizers
			and our consciousnesses turned to wood.
		St. Elizabeth took us into her care
			and love dissolved our will.
		The founders of the world of equal values
			took to healing us with our own poetry.
		The inexhaustible milk in St. Elizabeth's pitcher
			undermined the hierarchies' foundations.

Stick the blade into the cake, splintered
Reality holds together, an odd hope that already shined 
Through the cracks seals over. The poetry
T-group students meekly lower their eyes.
The balsam of words oozes through the cell walls – 
Glue of things and consciousnesses with bandaged arms – 
The metal taste in my mouth is changed by the sweetness of cake,
Returning us to harmonies, opening up
Memory's roads to nowhere.

____________________________________________________________
Parts of a poetry fusion made by Craig Czury from the works of current patients 
at St. E's Hospital are used in this text.


		
All poems translated from the Lithuanian by Jonas Zdanys

Kornelijus Platelis was born in 1951 in Šiauliai, in north central Lithuania. He graduated from the Vilnius Building Institute in 1973 and worked until 1988 as an engineer in Druskininkai, a resort town in southern Lithuania along the banks of the Nemunas River, where he now lives with his wife Zita, a high school English teacher, and their two sons. He published his first poems in 1977 and is the author of four collections of verse: Žodziai ir dienos (Words and Days; 1980), Namai ant tilto (Home on the Bridge; 1984), Pinklės vėjui (Snare for the Wind; 1987), and Luoto kevalas (The Boat Shell; 1990). He published his collected poems, Prakalbos upei (Orations to the River), in 1995. His extended essay on the ecology of culture, Būstas prie Nemuno (Being by the Nemunas), was published in 1989. He has also translated many of the most important American and British poets – among them Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Keats, Cummings, Ted Hughes, Heaney – and has been instrumental in developing commentary for a new Lithuanian edition of the Bible. In 1988 Platelis joined the democratic liberation movement Sajudis and after Lithuania declared its independence from the Soviet Union he served in the Lithuanian government of Vytautas Landsbergis as Vice Minister for Culture and Education. In the years 1991-1994 he was elected President of Lithuanian P.E.N., and worked as Director of VAGA Publishers Ltd. in Vilnius. Among his many honors and awards is appointment as Lithuania's Poet Laureate in 1996 and fellowships and grants from Lithuanian, Baltic, and Scandinavian sources. Today Platelis is one of Lithuania's most active poets. He is the initiator and organizer of the annual Druskininkai Autumn poetry conference held in reaction to "official," state sponsored poetry events. His poetry is noted for its deeply intellectual voice, and inventive use of archetype and myth. It is a mixture of political and declarative styles on the one hand and mystical intensity and metaphysical questioning on the other.