From "THE TALK OF FLOWERS"

I do not know, whether the sun 
accomplished it, 
the rain or wind –  
but I was missing so 
the whiteness and the snow.

I listened to the rustling 
of spring rain, 
washing the reddish buds 
of chestnut-trees, –  
and a tiny spring ran down 
into the valley from the hill –  
and I was missing 
the whiteness 
and the snow.

And in the yards, and on the slopes 
red-cheeked 
village maidens 
hung up the washings 
blown over by the wind 
and, leaning, 
stared a long while 
at the yellow tufts of sallow:

For love is like the wind, 
And love is like the water –  
it warms up with the spring, 
and freezes over – in the autumn.
But to me, I don't know why, 
whether the sun 
accomplished it, 
the rain or wind –  
but I was missing so 
the whiteness and the snow.

I know – the wind 
will blow and blow the washings, 
and the rain 
will wash and wash the chestnut-trees, –  
but love, which melted with 
the snow –  
will not return.

Deep below the snow sleep 
words and feelings: 
for today, watching 
the dance of rain between the door –  
the rain of spring! –  
I saw another:

she walked by in the rain, 
and beautiful she was, 
and smiled:

For love is like the wind, 
and love is like the water –  
it warms up with the spring 
and freezes over – in the autumn, 
though to me, I don't know why, 
whether the sun 
accomplished it, 
the rain or wind –  
but I was missing so 
the whiteness and the snow.

Translated by Clark Mills



FROM NOWHERE:  1

I will speak
only
in pronouns,
verbs,
things, 
possessive
adjectives,
such as
wide,
blue,
fragrant.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



FROM NOWHERE:  2

There is the word,
and music
of the word.

And there are
things,
dreams
and 
images.

I pick
one thing,
the
thing itself
is
poetry,
dream
and
reality:

ars
poetica.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



FROM NOWHERE:  3

The one
desire I have:

to say 
the word
for real,

palpable,
plain,

and speak
straight to the heart
of those
still able
to hear,
way under
the ice.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



From "IDILES OF SEMENIŠKIAI" 

First Idyll 

Old is rain gushing down shrubstems 

Old is rain gushing down shrubstems,
cockgrouse drumming in the red summer dawn.
Old is our talk of this.

And of the fields, yellowing barley and oats,
the cowherd fires wetblown in lonesome autumn.
Of the potato digs,
the heavy summer heat,
white winter glare and sleigh-din down unending roads.
Of heavy timber hauls, stony fallows,
the red brick ovens and outlying limerock.
Then – by the evening lamps, in autumn, while fields turn gray –
of wagonloads ready for tomorrow's market,
the roads, in October, washed out and swamped,
the potato digs drenched.

Old is our life here, long generations
pacing the fields off, wearing down plowland,
each foot of earth able to speak, still breathing of fathers.
Out of these cool stone wells
they drew water for their returning herds,
and when the flooring in the place wore down,
or the housewall quietly started to crumble, they dug their
yellow clay form the same pits,
their sand gold-fresh from the same fields.
And even with us gone
there will be others, sitting out on blue fieldstones,
mowing the overgrown meadows, plowing these plains,
and when they come in at the end of their day and sit down to the tables,
each table, each clay jug,
each beam in the wall will speak,
they'll have the sprawling yellow sandbanks to remember,
and ryefields swaying in the wind,
the sad songs of our women from the far side of a flax field,
and one smell, on first entering a new parlor,
the scent of fresh moss!

Oh, old is the flowering clover,
horses snorting in the summer night,
rollers, harrows and plows scouring tillage,
the heavy millstones rumbling,
and women weeding the rows, their kerchiefs glimmering white.
Old is rain gushing down shrubstems,
cockgrouse drumming in the red summer dawn.
Old is our talk of all this.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



Ninth Idyll

Villages and Plains the Streams Flow Through 

You too return, along with days gone,
and flow again, my blue rivers,

to carry on the songs of washerwomen,
fishermen's nets and grey wooden bridges.
Clear blue nights, smelling warm,
streams of thin mist off the meadow drift in
with distinct hoof-stomps from a fettered horse.

To carry off rioting spring thaws,
willows torn loose and yellow lily cups,
with children's shrill riots.
The summer heat, its midday simmer:
lillypads crowd, where a riverbed's narrowed,
while mud in the heat smells
of fish and rock-studded shallows.

And even at the peak, when the heat
locked in with no wind appears to shiver and burn,
and barn siding cracks in the sun, even then
this water touches shade, down in the reeds,
so you can feel the pull and crawl,
one cool blue current through your fingers,
and bending over its clear blue flow
make out field smells, shimmering meadows,
other villages passed on the way here,
remote unfamiliar homesteads,
the heavy oakwood tables
heaped with bread, meat, and a soup of cold greens,
the women waiting for the reapers to return.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



Fouteenth Idyll

Market days

Mondays, way before dawn,
before even the first hint of blue in the windows,
we'd hear it start, off the road past our place,
over on the highway nearby,
in a clatter of market-bound traffic.

Riding the rigs packed with fruit and crated live fowl,
or on foot, with cattle hitched to tailgates slowing the pace,
or sitting up high, on raised seats
(the women all wore their garish kerchiefs,
the knot under each chin carefully tied)

so jolting along, lurching in their seats,
in and out of woods, fields, scrub barrens,
with dogs out barking from every yard along the way,
in a cloud of dust.

And on, by narrow alleyways,
rattling across the cobbles,
up to the well in the market square.
With a crowd already there,
the wagons pull up by a stone wall
and people wave across to each other,
a bright noisy swarm.

And from there, first tossing our horse a tuft of clover,
father would go to look the livestock over.
Strolling past fruitwagons loaded with apples and pears,
past village women seated on wheelframes
and traders laid out along the base of the well,
he'd make his way to one large fenced-in yard
filled with bleating sheep, with horses and cows,
the air full of dung-stench and neighing,
hen squalls, non-stop bawling,
the farmers squabbling...

And mother, mindful of salt she needed to get,
as well as knitting needles, rushed right off;
and we'd be looking on to help our sister pick her thread,
dizzy from this endless spread of bright burning colors in front of us,
till mother pulled us back from the booths,

had us go past wagonloads of fruit and grain
to skirt the crowding square,

then head up that narrow, dusty side street
to see our aunt Kastūnė;
later, we'd still be talking away, when she hurried us back
past the tiny houses shoved up next to each other, along the river
and down to the mill, where with the last
of the rye-flour sacks stacked up in the wagon
and his shoes flour-white, his whole outfit pale flour-dust,
father would be waiting.

And on past nightfall, farmwagons keep clattering
back past scattered homesteads,
then on through the woods; while up ahead
cowherds perch impatient on top of the gateposts,
their caps pulled down on their eyes,
still waiting for us to get back.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



FROM "DIENORAŠČIAI 1970 – 1982"

1.

I sit
              drink beer	
gaze through the window
it's raining
a man rushes past
              with a newspaper
                           on his head

a woman
a green rain coat 
red
              intersections

the wet
sidewalk
              ripples
I sit
              drink beer
gaze through the window

4.

I 
wander
and
wander

sad
beneath
streets
of words

waiting
until
someone
              takes
              me by the hand
and
leads me
home

6.

I pound
on my own door... 
on my own door 
I pound ...

              Heavy stones
lie on my heart, on my memory, 
and separate me from myself, 
growing always heavier and heavier, 
and the roots of words 
burn.

(Does the wind wail or do the fields 
complain...?)

Have mercy on me, gods. 
Gods, solidify my longing, 
and shower, shower
              the rains of paradise
              on memory's roots.

9.

Times were hard. 
Now – everything 
has gone
              into the past.

Only the pain 
alone
remains 
impaled 
across 
the lake.

P.S:
A detail:
              Father shoved up against
a wall. 
I lie
with my face to the ground.

White potato 
blossoms.

11.

Days pass.
Nothing changes.
In the newspapers
there is a huge political scandal...

Ah, and by the way –
they've scrambled up onto the moon!

Only my life
remains boring, monotonous, 
and papers lie scattered 
across my desk ... 
I feel empty and guilty; 
in my heart
there is confusion.

Outside it begins to rain.
So I throw on a jacket,
and – like one of Schiller's romantics, 
a touch angry,
a touch melancholy –

slowly lifting one foot 
after the other
I walk the wet, crowded streets, 
drowning inside myself.

41.

Lush
tree tops
rush past ...

Verdant ... 
Civilization's
death throes
quiver

in the wounded
nuclear power plant
air.

71.

So Onute, you say you don't remember (maybe 
just in a dream the colors, the scents, the sounds 
are wrong) – you don't remember – 
how the wind fondled your blond wisps of hair 
through the open car window – 
Vilnius – Montefiascone –
              you don't remember –

we stood on the shores of Lake Bolsan 
in the gold of the sunset 
just a pair of friends – oh! 
the silence! – such peace –
              ah, paradise is not yet 
entirely lost, no –
we said, joking,
and emotion bobbed in the water 
blown by ecstasy's sails.

We stood
and evening's arms 
stroked a circle around us 
and your hair.

76.

Damp, cold,
and like on the Western Front 
Nothing has Changed.

I walk along and I think to myself 
In Lithuanian –
              damp
              Sunday

the squidgy corner 
of a newspaper – red, 
reflections of light 
a sidewalk, 
America.

Have you ever walked alone 
like this
on the streets of a foreign city,

knowing
that you are alone 
with your wet, 
Autumn 
raincoat –

alone, all alone
with your 
Lithuanian words? –

Autumn – a wet sidewalk – 
wind – damp – 
on the Western Front 
Nothing has Changed –.

Translated by Laima Sruoginis



8.

My head sags
from prowling
to salvage
	    scraps
           of my days.

This morning, it snowed.
Now, it's raining.

In a wheezing
            voice,
the preacher
curses
his city.

Head
hits
night's
down.

28.

I learned my geography
from war
maps.

Human anatomy
I came to grasp
from
accounts of
concentration camps.

47.

The Dachau trails
it's raining
on
thirty years
later

wet
underfoot
nameless
gravel.

48.

Sing in
calm
          I no longer can.

In deep
anguish
I can’t write down

I follow
the death
of my own
irresponsible
generation.

52.

late at night
drinking wine
think of friends
late at night

late city night
outside the window
words stack up
late at night

late at night
think of friends
drinking wine
late at night

heart sore and how
memory quakes
this late a night
the wine I drink

53.

O when we stomped
we stomped, tracking the flax

for tears.

O when we dug
we dug
canals
digging down deep

not enough to keep
                    bones of our pals.

57.

What went unrecorded, I
Adam,
          do now
attest.

How the sadness
lags my heart!

For no sooner had we made
one day's journey by road, when
at the limits of pain and thirst, stretched
to recover in the shade of a heated boulder,

unconvinced as yet our fate had real edge,

we saw the vast hub of paradise
split up in an innumerable mess of fragments
then come pouring, raining down,
on the skyline

and on my soul.

68.

fruit
bread
milk

death

life

this month
dropped
one half
percent

you pay
more for
everything

nothing for
nothing

– – – –

night on
cold
concrete

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



* * *

I don't know, whether it was
the sun had done it,
the rain or wind,
but I really missed
both snow and whiteness.

While listening to showers
rinsing the pink
fresh chestnut buds,
and the high brook running
downhill in rivulets,
I missed the snow
and whiteness.

Now while the yards
fill out with sound,
the red-cheeked
farmgirls string their wash
out in the wind,
then leaning back
stand there to watch
fresh yellow willow banks.

For love is like the wind,
and love is like water:
turning warm in spring,
freezing over in autumn.

But I, I don't know why,
whether the sun
had done it,
the rain or wind,
I really missed both
snow and whiteness.

This wet wind blows the wash
will blow again, I know;
just as the same old rain
rains in the chestnuts now.
Though love the snow took off with
will not be back,
asleep in deep snow
as words and heart are;
I watched it rain just now,
the first spring rain
dancing, at my open door!
Someone I never noticed before

went by in the downpour;
looking just lovely, she
even smiled at me.

So love is like the wind,
and like water too,
turning warm in spring,
freezing over in autumn,
and yet I still don't know
why: whether it was the sun,
the rain or wind
had done it,
I really miss both
snow and whiteness.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis

Jonas Mekas was born in the village of Semeniškiai in northern Lithuania and studied philosophy and romance languages in the University of Mainz, Germany. He came to the United States in 1949 and became interested in film-making, a pursuit through which he has become best known to the American public. He has been publishing the magazine Film Culture, producing a number of films with his brother Adolfas, among them Guns of the Trees, Halleluia the Hills, and The Brig, and is known as one of the originators of the "underground cinema" movement. Mekas is not only the widely known filmmaker, but also the founder and current director of Anthology Film Archives in New York City. His career as the galvanizing spirit in independent, non-commercial American film evolved to legendary distinction over the past four decades and has given him an international reputation. He has received numerous honors, including investiture in France's Legion of Honor, and is the subject of To Free the Cinema, a selection of appraisals edited by David James (Princeton University Press, 1990). Mekas, however, considers himself, first and foremost, a poet in the Lithuanian language. In his native Lithuania, Mekas is regarded one of its leading poets for the six separate volumes he has produced since 1947. There is No Ithaca, a selection from his early work translated by Vyt Bakaitis, with a preface by Czeslaw Milosz, has appeared in English (Black Thistle Press, New York, 1996). Mekas is a keeper of visionary chronicles. How closely his own activities are attuned to the general cultural ferment, the film installments of his continuing Diaries, Notes and Sketches, a generational epic in the form of a monumental, home-movie, will vigorously attest. Keynotes in his poetry are friendship, family, and "the tradition of soul," with redeeming glimpses of childhood to override the all-too-common aftershocks of World War II, when his own involvement in local anti-Nazi resistance occasioned what for Mekas became a lasting expatriation.