(born 1967)
SPLEEN
after Baudelaire
What snow-country king would not banish me
now, gone in the air? The day sky flames
an hour more, yet as irrecoverable;
midnight comes down, a more darkly-washed globe.
There is nothing more supplicates father
sky, mother earth; and potential is cold
rain sheared to fall in carbon sheets keeping
each apart from himself and from others.
Next spring will roll in without dumb drum or march.
Even stubborn winter's teethmarks look
a fit disloyalty to my throat or
the recovering ground. This sympathetic
magic province and I are corpses steeled
poor, rich with future copper, blooming white,
trefoil, sterile in memory and machine.
And bells, bells, bells; But fleurs-de-lys push
Up, headstones, end-game histories. And night's last
hours fly overhead like my blackened flag.
DETAIL FROM SUPERBIA
Ten thousand forced out, down glabrous
to disorder, gold Michael breaking backs
and bestial crowns. That someone else, by light
or word, laurelled grzzled pride or not, where
now skins squirm – our nest of separatists,
our ousted liberal opposition.
Animal
is not unevolved, but manufactures
no fruit tree, no engine as objet d'art.
This basic displacement: I should again
be translated back. But – if civic clinch;
kingdom, genus, puny species scrabbling
up; the lingual slur; brim eyes with alarm –
can grub-spirit; godhead rely on me?
The horn hangs used trophy to announcement.
October 30, 1995
STEPHEN DARIUS*
Chicago – Kaunas, 1933
This foreign commemorative gift coin reconstitutes its two
faces from a square of marine-blue-velveret sky.
Out of a profundum in glittering minted orbit, the obverse
shows poor captain and co-pilot turn glorious for their new
testament to future, race and country; on the reverse
perhaps the dechristened silver aeroplane
at last defeats gravity – its rust-orange
hull reborn on a transatlantic museum floor,
another captive of this shorter century.
Long days of remembrance fails to slow a wound
consigned to catastrophe's age-old hand.
The allegory, like most exile history, is a wreck.
It roars with vertiginous liberty as if native
invention waxed sunward on the day no part
machine; roars when man's dead reckoning and octant
and a twilight god sent electric storm delivered the small
black cross back from heaven's shield to earth.
Nineteen forty-four: wing-clipped behind DP campwire
God's birds** economised tobacco, kicked rocks,
named son and grandson after the pilot's blind flight.
*A Lithuanian-American pilot who, with co-pilot Stanley Girėnas,
attempted to fly nonstop from New York to Kaunas. The plane, a Bellanca
CH-300 Pacemaker christened Lituanica, crashed in Soldin, German – 400
miles short of its destination.
**God's birds, trans. dievo pauksteliai (ie DP, displaced persons) (Lithuanian).
THE CART
Mühlhausen, 1944
The cart bought on the other side of war's borderland
of corpses now steers to stop
for a portrait in cobbled Mühlhausen.
Its driver sits hunched, a woolprickled shade, blood
relative or in-law; its horse months
borrowed from a fled neighbour; its missized
wheels have rolled over the limbs of the dead.
Elsewhere you have fought past the trainstation's last
warring mob, with wife and son, inched
away as the dogs, let slip, raged ominous
long shadows, lost themselves snarling round brick
and wood streetcorners. Eleven-fifteen
frames an ungainly history: horse and cart
are still as black and white; the skies exposed
oppress the chimneys; a man poses
in dread peace with what has been left or passed on.
NAMES
to V. A. Sniečkus
Landing back in the capital of this evergreen realm
a visitor, the language that still holds an egg
to be both silver and gold came laughing
out of your childhood mouth; near relatives
gathered at the gate to drink up forgotten
phrases, lips grinning, like riverwater;
in your place, I'd have talked through my sleep.
There was no choice in Vilnius but that you
order all meals, memorise directions given
back to three shared rooms, refuse a shadow
faced Russian beggar his late demand for change.
Sometimes you would have said neither of us
had spoken his mother tongue before then.
Local lay curators toured us daily through the little
left as artefact in this city: the 450-
year-old printed catechismus, brought out
of hiding; native classical busts; paling
woven textiles curtained from the bare light.
I listened, foreign, blind to sound, assembling
back sense from a son's illiteral translations.
THE DARK BRIDGE
The lone photo turned up of the land
beyond the family house and farm
in Bublielai frames the square
wooden well as its subject,
yet shows
earth blacker than elsewhere, bared
winter trees, and lowlands
flooded by old underworld sorrows
that reflect
a frozen white heaven come to harm.
PHOTO OF MY GRANDFATHER
A long and short time later he was delivered
wearing his last black suit into labour
on this grainy land where shadows hid
winter dark NKVD dogs
and English whispered.
So the halt horse doctor retreated
down into a hospital morgue to work
nights among the cadavers
he could not cut at medical school.
ANTANAS SNIEČKUS (d. 1974)
For now because he slowed the influx of rude Russian
labour in those years and left behind a less
polluted language, the dead Communist
is said to have served his country and state.
There is necessarily no open
talk of papers banishing brother, wife
and child into the blaze of Siberian tundra:
after him, his own descendants face the brand
new order unannounced and Vilnius store
front windows display a thorny American
harvest that is and isn't selling fast.
Still the ghosts look to be going easy on
him, a sharp shade slipping up to Krushchev
and out the unhinged door to hunt for mushrooms.
CROSSES
Pine-high carved wooden crosses
stand still in a field
beside the Klaipeda-to-Vilnius
highway
like flags stolen
back and planted by long
haired Forest Brothers after
one last raid.
BALTOS NAKTYS 1997
The gloom grey angels* grappled to the zenith of a Jesuit town
belltower survey a wilderness of plaster and native
pine boards: new Vilnius is under reconstruction. Over long
white hours the rezoned city walls, the whispering drafty
ghetto glow late renaissance shades of first red earth or
amber for their plucked open eyes, the old cosmos catches
light like black
ceramic sainted by dusk.
Everywhere, meanwhile, this mortal
twentieth-century uncoils before a history's barred
gates of horn: the river Neris snakes muscular
north into forgetfulness, ghosts to gusty gloam, and still
another fugitive sword returns to zero in a foreign
quarter and his own dust. In this capital, millennia yawn.
*said, in legend, to divide the labour of watching over the happy and
the sad of Vilnius
THE CAPITAL OF LITHUANIA
for Aušra Bartkienė
The yet-lightblind general public pursues its navigation
of Vilnius with labyrinthine mental maps. These are the same
triumphal streets where grinning misdirection led a Soviet
force back by the nose to the trainstation, one at a time, and like
faces, buildings are remembered by photographic record.
The patient spectres of the still statistical dead slouch nearby.
To reach a distant destination from rooms lent off Gedimino
street by an absent relative, a near-unknown second
cousin shadowed the storm grey riverfront façades blocks
out of our way, jaggedly guided us left or right, then cornered
hard onto a boulevard and climbed to face the vacant
postwar KGB headquarters.
There stopped, she spat the name aloud in identification.
Lenin has not long been evicted from Lukiskiu Square.
Past this House of Sorrow I retraced her route on the late
return alone: the social-realist statuary that mans the city
bridges stands steeled to fall exiled, still eyeing the horizon.
TO EXILE
Montreal, 1996
Unwriter of poems, ad hack: what
else to claim Canadian about
my migration and populace? There is none other
than exile from old buckled geometry
of heaven-high plaster, vested
maple floors; or brother
chastisement. And a body will not rest
in motion, nor oppose this earthly
width like a sarcophagus.
I cannot die, flesh ink-dry
paper, cloth, but at home;
the black silver blizzards, gold
squalls illuminating the page of cold
childhood's snow-blind memory;
a country's brief blue kingdom
come and gone for us.
BLACK SPRING
London, 1996
The emptied black Blueline notebook eyes me back
from its perch, a city-grounded pigeon –
it knows nostos in its orange iris,
unbroken spine; bleached barren pages close
feathering covered rest; less predatory
furies: autumn is the spring of the mind.
I am pecking at my bleak own October,
the mind's recycled dearth; this sole talus
grips its shelf unscholarly against the fall,
against the flapping riot of free-flight.
My lost history: a doubt dare-devils lift
off, murdering moment after moment's
departure, a corpus, a lifetime
to come and go. I nod, I dodge my human
boot, hunch under inclemency, return
maladroit my own upstart rescuer –
club-clawed scrawl both wing and timed gravity.
HIBERNATION WEIGHT
1
My corpus, the cat's, starts to fatten:
it is late fall again.
Now shaving in the dark rosy mirror,
I see the oblique mass; so I am found
asking
how work is like a cat:
sleeping awake
or brutally flinching? Or why columns
prevail, when a digit turns
a statue shameful.
November: our clothes cover
deciduous; or a pelt – our modesty.
Will I reform from under, older in
this temple to lean pursuit?
My body, my Hermes
lumbers into action and hibernation.
2
Let's turn again to talk
routine
like the hoped-for better
mean devised from succumbency
to all heavy weather's measure.
Busts of writers are no
longer sold in statuaries;
hang fire
the cursor but it pulses four-day light.
Our brass world alone
suffers season's cracks. Yet
the second nicks about
the watch: quick anvil; harp; or oar.
3
Time told: I am not one.
And these four years:
official failures;
an American tin medallion
for my neck and throat.
But who can love snow
plows' oil-locomotive furrow;
or six months in boots and doubled coat?
Even, last night, mild January rain
fell as if fled from negligence:
a nonsense. The Canadian resistance
to cold; the feast of reason
as clocks relent
from decomposition; the arctic matrix:
we host a body of memory transfixed
by light godly blizzard: for we'd repent.
Black-iron church
bells appeal to metal manifold;
bridges; engines; flag-poles;
a pigeon perch. And this white Sunday quiet is lost
to traffic's toil
and Mount Royal
shaking – like a cane – its steel cross.
4
Young – winter,
summer – I wore
a constant hat:
as well to think
gods just beyond
the line of sight.
Now a hat returns –
if slouched and older –
to cover the head
and eyes over shoulder.
5
A day;
a day:
air is gunning
up like an arctic engine;
wind's war-car argumentum
ad baculum conquers
brief birdsong.
All's been driven under wheel.
This is no climb through bright
sparks fanned by Artemis.
The winter sun
burns weakly;
and snow, smoke, shade
are in commixture.
Now dead
words wake the dogs
to walk about.
Ours; mine; is yet
another day embattled
by reformation:
the season, the age
is almost over.
And each morning squalls
altered more violent;
more remote;
in any quiet nation.
6
The mountain firs greyly steam; the skatted rain
drop tap acts out the counting on:
April
is doubtless ticking in from sea to stream.
Let the month comes down,
the globe have its fill.
On the skull of Mount Royale
the cross stays up – blind witness to high erosion,
not the worm-rich decomposition
of foot hills. Below, the plateau soil
welcomes old promise
from the blood-cold run
off of fall's horse-mortal din.
And this Easter Tuesday sits sombre as an office.
The kitchen is dark at my back; Daylight
Savings Time again
will raise the day-long slight
of the hour lost and yet regained.
7
Come out, come out –
the wild waters spout;
the grass stems stir
the air.
In eight o'clock's light,
old order walks tonight
as certain of blood as doubt.
Out, out:
the stone's rolled clear,
the door is ajar;
our eye-teeth are whet
by white.
Wide night whirs on worn cogs;
and now dogs and dogs
and pale neighbors
walk soft on the earth and its papers.
Darius Victor Sniečkus lives and writes in London, England. Of Lithuanian and British parentage, he studied English literaturte and classical studies at the university of Ottawa, Canada. His work has been published in chapbook form (The Brueghel Desk, Pneuma Press, 1994), as well as in various literary magazines including Broke and Lituanus. |
