CLEARING

I see the wind trip off for the sun on fading wings!
Hands we held, lips we loved, the fresh
Coastlines, beaming:
Like camels filled up on pure water
We sway down crisscrossing eternal roads
The sand
Flares on our frail, parched faces,

A solitary windblown sign's drab stucco fusing

Time's engorging rainstorm.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis


ICE BLOSSOM

Ice blossom stuck
In snow echo struck,
Bent willow strands
Dangle a dazzling
Icicle dowry.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis


BLACK

Night black
As
Black lips
A sweet gorge cut in sward's rutted shag;
Honey blossoms
As
Tears warm to vivid
On your shed bows,
Starting to shine
Diamond.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis


THROAT MINT

As mint for your throat
Singing's just right.
Dew strikes the wind
Springs, trembling light.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis


GROWING CLOSE

Plain homespun,
remember,
the days when? But that was grain in the palm
the nearness, warmth and hunger
we heaped!
Our trembling lips
testing
the silence
in silence.  A pale wrap of fog over there
that your glance repeats
streaming past just
now on the breeze. Now then,
uncaulked
hours dribble down the sill; and
leaning on
rundown quiet from autumn woods
one hand now
plays and plays (and what for?)
the latch back
from the door.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis


LEAVES

Yellow leaves falling,
Flaring autumn fires
Cover blue sky; red sky cover
Now blue, slow falling leaves
Dim to grey
Handheld flame.
Falling in spinout
Layouts, fragrance gone
From the rain,
Red leaves brim a blue drain.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis


DECEMBER

Black ice
Yaws
Its jaws

Springs splurge
Mute. Barefoot

Girl 
Leans
Black wind flames

On the sun's piled grave.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis


LIKE

Just like Verlaine, Rimbaud or Valéry
this song has
the same clear resonance for me
as the green Rimbaud or red Valéry
set high on
the upper shelf, or laid open
before a winter hearth cracking iced logs;
just as this
day,
today,
holds out to me
the sounds of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Valéry
with its
howls
inside a creaking icy well.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis

Leonas Lėtas (Leo the Slow) is the elemental pseudonym that Leo Adams attached to the poems he wrote in Lithuanian. He was born as Vytautas Adamkevičius in 1924, attended schools in Kaunas, where he also began studying voice and joined a local theater group as a performer and scenic designer. Although he did not publish his first book until 1981, some of the poems in it date from the late forties and his association with the short-lived quarterly avant-garde review which Jonas Mekas organized in post-war Germany. Lėtas' lyric method inclines to a manner of modernist compression which is particularly resistant to translation. Each poem tests the suppleness of a rich and varied folk idiom adapted to brusquely shifting rhythms set in unpredictable, often unconventionally abbreviated patterns. His best work holds the fresh glow of a restless ingenuity. His version of Rilke's Diuno Elegies, was judged to be too fractional and unabashedly mannered, on the basis of the two that appeared, and perhaps as a result the project has never been published in its entirety.