LOVE, A LAST GLANCE

Which branch will you string that rabbit,
the fruit of our love, from?
I neither got drunk, nor killed myself:
just let the snow smack my forehead.

And I stopped in the middle of the square
and paid them not to play.
Once Noah had faded downstream,
the animals converged behind bars.

Nothing else had any point.
Mice all fled their nests.
At any rate, there wasn't enough snow
to snub me off for good.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



* * *

It's time to bury this age
with its litter of yearbooks and daws.
My teeth are busy at the window ledge,
gnawing an ice-locked apricot bud.

White winter oozing down the throat
how good it is, not to believe in heaven,
I chuck my rhymes into one heap,
breaking my pledge and my umbrella.

All names take on the form of lies,
sloshed full of a day's precipitation.
How good to die and turn up late for
the grave that's yours by reservation.

Nothing to boast of, no regrets,
with dreams that hold no riddle or bait.
In any case, they'll shower you with rocks.
That's why I say: now is no time to wait.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



LULLABY

It's too late now, the road washed out;
maybe there never was a road through here,
with just mosquito tracks on the skin of the flood,
or where a whip struck you across the legs.

It stung, you say? Hard to believe. No need to.
Keep your own flea to testify for you.
Speak loud and clear, kid; even raise your voice
louder to say that none of it is true.

It's no longer crucial, no one calls you by name,
now moths crowd into empty shoes,
autumn in passing wrecks the house
and hacks its lungs out along the way.

Soon it gets dark, flies settle for the comfort
of oversize seats they find set out for them;
if their wings give off shade and buzzing,
clue me in: nothing there I can hear, or see.

A red skirt in the yard still plays at hopscotch,
roosters stay mum, their coops now full of stars.
So sleep, you human fool, rest and stay calm,
now no one ever checks on you, no one at all.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis

Daiva Čepauskaitė was born in Marijampolė. She took her degree from a medical institute in Kaunas but has since pursued, successfully, a career in acting. She has published two books of verse. As with the best poetry anywhere, key ambiguities are sustained allusively in her poems in order to keep them unresolved, still open to suggestion, despite the formal pitch of their rhetoric, whether in observance of public events or private occasions.