A POEM ABOUT ARCHITECTURE

here the days are all so loyal 
and all so light, my friend, 
like the heights of the bell towers and steeples 
at whose bottom we wait for darkness;
so tell me, how will we struggle against 
the springs found in the clay, 
the meteorite mints on the porch, 
the dynasty of islands and straits?

and so then we, who pick the luxurious apple 
which did not grow for us in the deserts, 
who have divided the glory of the dead 
like a giant linen shawl, 
who have declared freedom's moratorium, 
who have learned to repeat 
the history of heaven's unliving in the storm, 
the geometry of resurrection;

and so the beginning, and the foam in the boat 
beyond the smoking red embankment 
(boulevards, sailboats and the Baltic 
breathe deeply and accept) – 
though the city stones constrict us, 
with new names we named forever 
the waves, middle-age, middle-earth, 
winters and the water full of birds;

and so our homeland; defend yourself; 
its gothic doors are ajar, 
and the airless distances are so close, 
and the heavens are like smokeless gunpowder

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



POEM

a few of the blue-grey balconies remind us of bark; 
they are deeply engraved with Martian-like tree-writing; 
bright nails and numbers fall into formation; 
the air smells of cold and sap; the paints have not yet hidden 
beneath the burden of snow. Healthy, quick, splatterable turpentine 
by the roadside, the frankness of unnecessary letters
and weighty, almost unreal, ice formations, 
the black round city like a shellacked plate 
beneath the burden of snow. 
Black shadows of tree trunks, streetcars, 
then the telephone bell, toys sharp as if broken; 
and the thicknesses of metaphors. When we walk into the street 
watches shine in windows and on pulses. 
Who will take our places now? Who will need 
the December rain, February thunder, March drought?

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



THE VALLEY OF ARARAT

So unexpected, finished, and sensible, 
And we are not searched for in vain 
By the forgetful and scorn-swollen 
Incensed lord of the earth. 
And not in vain are the blueberries 
Of the biblical flat-topped hills 
So abundant and so miserable 
When the waters of the Savus are born 
In the dead Armenian springs. 
We will accept your offering of peace, 
All of your translucent lead – 
O, how our mouths are cut by the black hoar-frost 
In the dead Armenian springs.

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



POEM

Let the time you do not remember 
and the world you did not find 
be as black and white 
as stones, as the names of appletrees 
and boulevards.

Let sugar, curds, and the persistent, 
square-cornered water in jars, 
and the dying lights in movie theaters, 
and the nightingales in suburban fields, 
suffer through litigations for many hours.

Let the taste of gunpowder remind us 
that the dawn brightened not so long ago 
and small trains on picnics pass by 
the beast-cages of the city, –

because the canal where our tears flow 
was so easily marked by pencils 
and yellow salt strewn by the hand 
of a blind, incomprehensible God.

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



AXENOS PONTOS

That very first sea of misfortune 
Is as inhospitable as the spears of the Danaides, 
Its salty waters flood to shore
	In Sapphic strophes.

That's how he, perhaps, beneath the olive tree 
On the distant roads fell asleep forever 
Without seeing the Phaeacian boat
	And Nausicaa.

We won't believe that he returned, 
That in Ithaca’s barns he forgot his land, 
Where the mountain snows overcome the Pontos
	Screaming sand,

Where there is no beginning, present, or kindness, 
And in the gods' night, in the weightless abyss, 
The Pleiades, like a golden wave whip themselves
	Into foam.

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



A POEM ABOUT DEATH

That's why the desert skies begin to clear 
And the spider overcomes the sand, 
And no one will say that we stayed 
Where the thinned air oppressed us, 
That we sleep with an admixture of tears, 
Paying off the debt in salt, 
Won't say, that in the suburbs of midday 
Sprouted the trees of poetry.

Their branches slump for travelers, 
Through the night bending off bridges, 
Withdrawing and demanding 
That no one speak for a long time, 
For the word, silent since yesterday, 
Is not translatable into human language,- 
And in the lungs float flotillas, 
And the fingers turn into ferns.

Deeper and deeper it penetrates 
And then fragments, fracturing hell 
(Perspiring plane geometry 
Was found in the glacier and in the poplar seed 
By the rejuvenated Braque, 
But at nightfall the echo offset it, 
Having opened up an artillery of names 
In the Sahara, in Teberda, in Tanganyika).

That's why it's not necessary, not proper,
Forgiven through the ages and possible
To sink the landscape like an anchor
Into the darkened depths of the valley.
Forgiving winters and confusion,
An inscrutable ruck of oaktrees,
And the stars beneath my head like moss,
And it's hard, and it's hard to sleep.

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



DIALOGUE IN WINTER

Step into this landscape. It is still dark. 
On the far side of the dunes drones the empty road. 
The continent wars with the seas –
It is invisible, but brimming with voices. 
A traveler or an angel left 
This light snow-dusted track, 
And the shore's reflection in the black window 
Reminds us of the sterile Antarctic.

The deep sea still foams, is not yet frozen. 
The sands have blown for more than just a mile. 
Here the bridge becomes distinct, here obscure 
As the severe cavity of winter grows and spreads. 
There are no telegrams, no letters, 
Only photographs. The transistor doesn't work. 
It is as if a candle, dripping wax, 
Stamped and sealed this dangerous time.

How damp the air, how steep the rock, 
How powerful the roentgen of daybreak! 
Straining your eyes you can see how the walls clear, 
The church tower, and the figure of a man. 
Only the foggy contours of trees stand out 
Against the white background. Through the bark, 
Even shut-eyed, you can almost see 
The last, narrow resistant ring.

"That habit tires the eyes, 
After an hour, it's not hard to get lost." 
"Prophecy does not waste its whispers on us." 
The hoarfrost-covered axis tilts, 
And it seems that at the edge of the horizon, 
Where ships blacken and sound stiffens, 
In the sluggish ocean sky 
Flare the planets Jupiter and Mars.
 The emptiness spreads to the Atlantic. 
The fields are bare – like unlocked halls. 
February hides beneath January's layers, 
The plains cower from the wet wind. 
Beyond the seas, mountains bare themselves, 
In the depths the dissolving snowdrift 
Dwindles and blackens. "And what is that?" 
"Again, river mouths, bays, and harbors."

Beneath the heavy net of clouds 
Cramped clearings glitter like fish. 
"Do you remember what the stars said?" 
"This century rolls into being without signs, 
That's the fact." "Death's attraction 
Fetters man, plant, and thing, 
That's why grains sprout and offerings burn, 
And that's why I think not everything is finished."

"Where is the witness? I don't understand, 
Who divides the truth from the lies: 
Perhaps the two of us are alone in the world." 
"And it seems to me you are the only one " 
"And the third speaker? You say 
No one hears this discussion?" 
"There is heaven and the snow-covered fields, 
And sometimes the voice outlives the heart."

Midday darkens the trees. 
In broad daylight, you are conscious only 
Of small things, scratched from nothing an hour ago, 
Which stand in place of the words: 
A broken chip of an ice chunk, 
A skeleton of branches, a crumbled brickhouse 
Near the bend in the road... Later – stillness 
On this side of the sea, and on the other side of the sea.

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



POEM

Nightfall arrived with a chill: 
Beyond the thick blackened arches 
Appeared perhaps ten stations 
And several November parks – 
That settlement or circle 
Where on the blind brickhouse falls 
An errant one-hundred-watt lightray, 
The escort into the labyrinth.

The rule of Ariadne and Minos 
Is temporarily useful: 
Because of the fog for several hours 
Not a single plane takes off.

Each day the trains are packed – 
How much space, how much air and misery! 
That's how prisoners who returned home 
Sometimes longed for the guard.

Like the repaid debt of the void 
Opened several familiar places. 
I repeated: "Monument, island, 
Bus, university." 
I said: "I will leave tomorrow, 
I will go or will at least try." 
And along the edge of the world of the living 
My soul hurried into darkness.

Old addresses drew near,
Letters changed form and meaning.
I listened to how voices deaden,
Not able to find the two of us
Even within this empty locked house
Where the paintings don't recognize me,
Not in dreams, not in heaven's kingdom, 
Not in Dante's second circle.

That's how time is stopped; more precisely, 
It must be broken off gradually, 
It's just that, you'd say, each year 
You hear the more distant ringing of the telephone. 
And day after day memory 
Changes its diameter like a compass, 
Until the past becomes a single stroke 
After having at first feigned complexity.

I don't know what you hear and see 
In the reality chipped from reality. 
Acheron's paved shores 
Withstood the unfeeling swell. 
Each nullity is separate, 
And the world lives on without us, 
And, to tell the truth, there are 
Stillness and the nine muses.

There where the capital turns in circles 
And the snow-games weary us, 
Where fog does not betray the things, 
Thank God there is still the dictionary. 
In the kingdom where a friend's hand 
Will never hurry to help 
Emptiness or the highest power 
Sends the angel – rhythm and language.

I don't ask for even a short oblivion,
Nor death, nor the forgiveness of sins,
Just leave the primordial pealing
Above the stone and icy night.

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



TELL FORTINBRAS

Time, voice and gesture they refused,
And so escaped the weight of unknown legacies,
They tucked captivity beneath the doorsteps
And never came to see the final act,	
And Denmark, Denmark is no more.

So may they rest. White islands,
Rock salt replenish their blood,
Snow storms arise from shores of Connaught,
The forests wrapped in steam, the shaggy orchards,
And Denmark, Denmark is no more.

Eternity rejects, eternity protects them,
While summer guards the sandy shores,
The stained glass, the patience of rocks,
The orphaned field and the curse-withered willow.
And Denmark, Denmark is no more.

Translated by Algirdas Landsbergis



* * *

		... a low dishonest decade...
				     W.H. Auden

Summer inundates the city. 
Windows reflect only dust. 
Into the smoky chalice 
Drips warmed wine. 
The air is spiced 
By the fading gold of cupolas in the sun, 
Silt like Cyrillic letters 
Darkens the narrow canal.

What do you seek here, poet? 
An old balcony, the text 
Erased from the falling plaster, 
A world turned to dust. 
The Gordian knot is untied, 
Chalk, pavement and timber, 
Mud in the gateway, staircase 
Garbage, doors ajar.

Where once gesture, 
Life and sound were one, 
Roaring crowds now employ 
An altered language. 
June flutters white, 
And the blind calcifying brain 
Cannot comprehend 
All the time lost.

The age colors accents,
Syntax and architecture,
Sun droplets on the columns,
The bronze smile in the niche.
Perhaps only poverty and hunger
Still resist the age,
Perhaps only fear and a shadow 
Are all that is left of our youth.

Adjust to swimming in fear 
As a fish in the ocean. 
Fear is long-lived here, 
Far more durable than bodies. 
Peaceful circular squares 
Savor the midday smoke. 
Chalk, pavement and gypsum, 
Characters on falling plaster.

Only a few copper coins
Remain of life – the change,
Left over from time, counted out
By the local bank of the absurd.
Melody and gesture stop dead.
The avenues turn their backs to the sidestreets.
Strange that we met
Earlier than we expected –

Not in the Valley of Jehosephat, 
Not in the woods by Lethe's banks, 
Not even in the airless universe, 
Where Kelvin and Becquerel 
Rule as gods. 
Warmed wine still drips. 
Clouds of insomnia float 
Over the hot white June.

The crowd and its sound float on, 
But the weight of our craft stays the same – 
To concentrate fear in a word, 
To transform time into meaning. 
Only the dust quavers, only the voice. 
It is not for the voice to know 
How much truth can fit 
In its radiance and solitude.

Translated by Violeta Kelertas and Gregory M. Grazevich



POEM

Since early September we have been caught in the pull of the cosmos.
Close your eyes, and you'll know how a leaf that brushes your face
Rubs against the shutters, by mistake touches a cloud,
And sticks between the rooftiles to escape the touch of our hands.

A tree drains the day. The sky is white and blind.
The voice withdraws, having waded into the ebbing valley.
Everything gathers within me so l would know how wearied Atreus
Rejoiced at the castle's silence and the steaming waters.

Will you pass this threshold? Fate, weir, gravel,
Niggardly shabby churches, triangular mires.
The wide hour rushes into rot and loam,
The city circles, and the twelve winds rise in a row.

Will you win me or lose me – thus far no one knows.
The fallows have eroded, the constellations have been pruned.
I attract misfortune, like true north the magnet,		
Like a magnet a magnet, misfortune attracts me.

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



SESTINA

It is nearly six, and the ice-covered road 
Bends toward the north. Chains 
Clatter on tires. The muffled metal echo, 
Like the surface of a lake, glitters up front. 
The weightless and wounded March snow 
Still tries to cover the annihilated forest.

Like a drawbridge which divides the sluggish forest,
My glance lifts and stops. It is led astray by the road
Against which several times have battered the snow
And the monotonous chains
Of birch trees. In the pure mist the well rises in front
Of the empty houses. And everything else is an echo

And clots of air. The aimless echo,
Which does not exist, resounds through the forest.
The graphite mirror stands blackly in front
Of the great darkness. We have been given the road
And the heaven-sent chains,
The invisible but all-powerful snow.

The old-aged spring is watched by the snow,
And our hearing is unraveled by the many-faced echo.
Like a pond which has broken loose from its chains,
A blind thought seeps into the forest.
Here, gasoline will not help, the white road,
Or the beam of light clearing up front.

The formless cosmos emerges in front. 
The biting star, the mindless snow 
That cloaks the field, the armed road. 
A shadow, a reflection, a painting, an echo 
Fill the crumbling Arden forest, 
And their payment is the solitary chains.

Will we be tempered by your chains?
Things and elements stand in front
Of me. I will leave that severe forest
Where the trees are covered and guarded by snow,
And the word is replaced by an empty echo,
And everything ends. Perhaps the road

Is a net of chains. My protected road 
To your forest. The earth is frozen with snow. 
We have become enemies. You are only an echo.

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



POEM

As if in a photograph, it is spacious and dangerous. 
The skies pull back from the rooftops 
Having consumed the white plague of the city, 
The early freeze penetrates our words, 
Singeing our mouths and lungs 
In the empery by the imprisoned seas.

The past provides no signs. 
The blackened sun beats against the floor, 
And our journeys finally end 
Where our birthplace, deadlock, and burden 
Become irreparably severe 
And the columns of Paestum sink into the marsh.

Tuesday. Clear weather Near winter. 
The lowlands press against the Finnish shores 
And surround the harbor. 
Perhaps then or perhaps earlier 
The hour ruptured above the river 
And time transfigured into gesture.

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



A POEM ABOUT FRIENDS

                        For Nataliya Gorbanevskaya

When even strangers are not strangers 
And all that has not yet happened 
Flows in currents to nonexistence, 
As if nothingness had a direction, 
When outside the city day ends 
And the radio crackles as the storm approaches, 
Let's lock ourselves away once again 
From the last minutes of summer.

When the skies are dark, through the door walk 
The vanished, the overdue, the retreated 
For whom this night our room 
Is the only Elysian field, 
Whose shadows wander through our dreams 
Having loved and forgotten each other, 
Who settle down in the pits of mirrors 
And unexpectedly surface and rise.

And so are reborn in their buried coffins 
The winged women, the unseen brothers, 
The generation long changed to echoes, 
To book margins, to dry grass; 
And those who still live are gathered by fogs, 
Empty houses and long journeys. 
Their weapon – resistance and silence, 
And the hope that Apollo may yet save them.

The garret will dissemble nature's bounds,
The night will separate the thaw from the frost,
And even language in the presence of death
Will protect their constancy if.
Having poisoned sensation and thought,
Having hollowed out a hole in the stone steps, 
An unasked for future awaits them – 
Their wasted and remitted thing.

They visited our forest. The dead
Furniture remembers their wood-like fingers. 
Having marched into maturity 
They do not answer to the earthly judge. 
They are an open and great family 
Whose children share a single name – 
Having replaced their voice, emptiness 
Fills our spares to the limit.

I don't believe in misadventure and believe 
In friends for whom I have equally divided 
The distance between the world and the eyes, 
This fragile and ethereal endlessness. 
All faces vanish in the light. 
Lamps burn out, truths come clear, 
But all their footsteps meet in me 
The way parallel lines in the distance converge.

Again the fall, filled and lavish.
In the city won by a few souls
Above foreign streetcars and old houses
This is September's first brave hour.
Large barges loom in the water,
Each nerve in the morning is strained,
And the first leaf that hits the ground 
Is angular, like a coat of arms.

Translated by Jonas Zdanys



A VIEW FROM AN ALLEY

Where gooseberries used to grow, new landlords have turned up 
the soil.
The courtyard is tightly sealed from the street's chestnut trees
by a dark bluish double fence. All dimensions have shrunk,
except for time. There was more space here than childhood alone 
can explain.
Squinting, you can still climb the dissolved staircase
up to the attic, where the floor still squeaks under your cousin's steps.
For long? He asked us then. Only for one night (but that 
happened later).
On the first floor a mass of mirror turned to stone, easily meshing
the hoarfrost of a faraway storm, the crown of a plum tree, a flask
rich with dense scents. These early insomnias: the chime
through the wall, helping us understand that everything passes,
but not soon; that time depends on speech,
that the worst-case scenario turns out a little less
than what we can bear. A heaven of photographs behind the door.
In one I make out a shadow with a glass of cherry juice
and a dog. These snapshots still live somewhere,
although few people today would be able to figure them out.
The dog is buried in the corner of the kitchen garden
(now I cannot see the place behind the double fence)
and the shadow, pressing the glass to his mouth, still glides
on the surface of objects, next to the ribbed wallpaper,
the destitute greenery, the littered years, which belong
not to him, nor to the new landlords, a little more real than he.
No one knows what matches this dead space,
this empty cell in the net of alleys:
indifference or pain? Strangely, they coincide.

Translated by Diana Senechal



* * *

Slow down and stop.  The sentence falls apart.
The ridge of rooftops fits in with the dawn.
The snow is talking, the fire backing it up.

The pendulum swing diminishes,
Its lead weight brushing the floor.
Slow down and stop. The sentence falls apart.

Where the world was, an etching glows instead.
A playful mirror shines it back.
The snow is talking, the fire backing it up.

The convict goes back into his cell
As prison bars wade out into the sky.
Slow down and stop. The sentence falls apart.

A fragment of space, a grain of time
Encloses our bodies like an orb.
The snow is talking, the fire backing it up.

All that will vanish reaches for your face,
And there's no angel at the back of your head.
Slow down and stop. The sentence falls apart.
The snow is talking, the fire backing it up.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



POEM ON SUMMER AND SUCCESS

The heated sidewalk will smack you in the glasses
To let you know what dying is;
An hour you cannot get your fingers wet in
Still swamps the non-breathing network of streets.

And with a rowdy dawn to simmer bridge stones,
With space bare and amazed,
The air, in going off, will wring
The one cloud left to its last drop.

We'll inhale the paint, off drifting cities,
Oil and tartness flooding the brooks.
Midnight not yet born will be like
A mirror, sunlit and split.

It may be the day past, or the next, a time that never was,
Yet the sky shows white, not blue,
Where the last stops are all clearly marked
In poems, paved roads and maps.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



IN A STATION OF THE BERLIN METRO

Now winter's seal on Europe shrinks and buckles
Broad asphalt fields break open like chestnuts.
Space minus its overbearing menace is Berlin's
Insular winter in bone, cardboard, concrete,

Where we see heaven reversed.  Street patrols.
Blinking blue lights.  A wallpatch bulging with pride.
The vacuum lacks direction.  Spooled thread leads to
No other existence.  High over Europe, snow beats its wings.

After the miles and seasons you've logged, it's more or less
The same where you put in next, whether at Jericho or Mitte.
Termites are hard at work, and cities change their layout,
Still, their dull rumble can't withstand the trumpet's blast.

Step back into the past for a glimpse of tomorrow:
No solid human shadow half-sunk in dirty snow is
Meant to witness the cardboard boxcar just hauled in
At Hallesches Tor, from nowhere and beyond.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



MARINE LANDING

The hardest thing to do was to hide the boats they had dragged up onto the sand, 
to cut up the tight rubber, shove the scraps under the bushes, 
to ignore the prickly rain that comes before the dawn, 

inundating the spine. The low pines kept silent across the dunes.
When the line moved, he sighed. His esophagus 
recalled the memory of yesterday's seasickness, 

and his shoulders, the strap of the backpack. Penicillin, binoculars,
ammunition, written off of army storage the year before last, 
a letter from an old minister with the word "long live unity," 

a radio. Never having been to this seaside before, he sank 
in the sand, pressed the pine needles, aligned himself with his friend's jacket, 
knowing his homeland by the shape of the cumulus cloud. 


* * * 

The needle of the compass danced out the ritual klumpakojis dance.
Eight kilometers down the road, next to the deserted farm, 
he'd have to encounter the Bear, the Fern Blossom and the Goat – 

nicknames from fables. An unfamiliar group stomped its feet 
in the glade. The commander, whom he had seen somewhere before 
in the unfinished war, said the password. Alleviated, 

his companions disappeared in the dugout, but he lagged behind. His boot
slipped on the mossy tussock by the stream, and the blow, 
missing the back of his head, landed in his elbow. Grabbing 

his holster in a rush, he was able to feel
the muscles in his kneeling leg tense; he saw the black aperture 
before his eyes and grasped: well, that guy is quicker. 


* * * 

His brains, clinging to the stem of a reed, dried up long ago. 
The rest soaked into the sand. At least he's lucky 
the secret service couldn't extract any codes from it, 

since, were it not for the wet hummock, probably he, like his two friends,
who were less fortunate that morning, say what you will, 
would have misled his people in the dark games of the Great 

Powers, would have reached old age in the stinging cigarette smoke
in a provincial cafe with a hundred grams of cognac, 
trying to persuade everyone, including himself, that he saved 

young people from bullets and nooses – or, maybe 
having been across the Arctic Circle and back, he would have striven 
in vain, in ignorant offices for compensation for the lost time. 


* * * 

If s better the way it turned out. No cross, no memory. 
The trucks stagger on the bumpy strip of gravel road 
a few steps away from the place where it all happened. 

The sweat-soaked drivers play the brakes like piano keys, 
an axe is heard in the pine forest, the farmstead walls turn white, 
the cuckoo promises we'll live long yet: 

three times or maybe even four times as long as he. 
Whoever died will never return; what's lost is gone. 
Only the scraps of the rubber boat under the seaside willow 

still await the Lord's Judgment, and the outline of the cloud, 
exactly the same as then, crawls over the forest glade, 
and the algae sway in the stream, which he didn't reach then. 

Translated by Diana Senechal



COMMENTARY

First of all, though it's hard, love language, humbled in newspapers,
in obituaries saturated with lies, the darkness of stuffy bedrooms,
in the informer's typewriting, the cry at the bazaar, trenches,
in the stench of hospital wards, in third-rate theatres,

in investigative offices, on lavatory walls.
In the gray buildings, where steel nets preserve
the bottom of the stair cage, so that not man, but the century
will choose the moment when dying is allowed,

this language, almost collapsed, littered with sound
and fury. That's it, to love language,
banished to earth along with us, since
even then the primordial word is reflected

in it, as though born in another universe.
It was given to us so that we could be different from clay,
the palm, the thrush, maybe even from angels,
so that, naming objects, we could perceive them clearly.

Those who try to return to the lost space,
cleansing their language, should understand
that they will almost surely lose. Because the doors,
as we know, recede faster than you can approach them,

the gift is equal to loss; that which is built
will be destroyed quickly. Nor should one go
into someone else's heaven (since there are many). Whoever reaches
authentic heaven wipes out his footsteps and tosses the key away.

They say you are only a tool. You are dictated by
a force, which you can't face head-on, or you'll go blind.
That's not exactly the case. You'll climb Jacob’s ladder in a dream,
groping, using strength you don't have, not protected by the net,

until someone up above finds you (or maybe doesn’t). Sometimes,
moving you aside, he transposes two or three words,
changes a vowel, tightens the syntax, the degree.
This happens very rarely, but it does happen,

and then you become the one who saw that it was good,
since letters float across the page like sludge on a river,
and suddenly bushes, an embankment, a city emerge into view.
And who reads this (if anyone), you do not even have to know. 

Translated by Diana Senechal



THE RETURN OF THE SINGER

In this dark state, the show is white as before.

Under wheels, the asphalt squeaks, ice-crusted and clear.
If the pupil, cornea, ruins of the retina survive,
soon we’ll see a new millennium outside.

The river leaps on the threshold, waves knock on the door,
and the bygone century returns to its home of yore.

Its confused space has undergone several remodelings,
while the faded pictures have found a silk drawing room

where the holes in the plaster were patched up with other textures
matchmakers, confidants, unifying and forbidden treasure).

Already you and I see only what really was there:
collapsing stoves, a room that many came to share.

Squinting slightly, you perceive a costume of the stage,
a billiard, shelves, the sum of another age;

in the curtain's creases, pockets of old air are hidden,
but for them, as for me, your body is now forgotten.

There are no roads into the senseless terrains,
where dilapidated posters once extolled the czardom of mines

and missiles, where candles used to drip sweat on the table,
where equal affection, as always, was not possible.

Let us stand on between the museum box office and the yellow
plane of a rug. A few rooms away, in the ribbed hollow

of the record player, the landlord's famed bass swells
and tumbles into the abyss. He was an émigré as well.

These cubic meters, split into passion and void,
preserved only the second part. As if after a fire, we toyed

with time in the snow. Only bricks and pipes remained.
This dark is meeting other eyes, not yours, not mine. 

Translated by Diana Senechal



SAN MICHELE

Two-faced, just like Janus, the crack
leans up against the boat, hurled by the churning
waves up onto the wharf. Thus forms the link
between eye, cupola and firmament.
The motor thrashes in the midst of desert,
and the corroded starboard crushes the clay,
where Orcus greets us with coagulated walls
and the June sun, transparent as the sky.
Grass and stone. Same island as before.
And, turning to stone, a wanderer lends his ear
to the heaping of the silence on the bush,
the thick sound of sphere answering sphere,
the limestone pushing its way into the waves,
while the consciousness is wakened into feeling
no longer by a jab of pain, but still
something other than water, tree, or steamship. 

Translated by Diana Senechal



R.K.

All I know is this, that it has passed (or is passing) – 
this century of blackness, maybe not any blacker 
than a few others, but on an incredible scale. 
It was consistent. It turned bodies into numbers, 
and crumbled souls into sawdust and nothingness,
so it'd seem as though the mind had won. A precipice 
pretending to be hope – I'd say, somewhat successfully.

The evil designs of conceit were loyally executed by furnaces, 
and in the next ring was solid ice 
under a stony star. Choking freight trains 
labored towards nothingness, to the West and to the North. 
But everything is temporary. Monuments to the Empire – 
in the mud between tenacious thistles and burrs. 
The megaphones grew quiet and the granite weathered.

We were born in that land. Now, as we leave it behind,
we don't even dare turn around, like Orpheus. 
What did we have with us? Irony, patience,
and – very rarely – courage. Often it was the undefined feeling 
that you'd done far less than you could have 
(a sinking realization of guilt – or sin – that your children 
would not forgive you even if God did.)

That is all we chose. And even so we knew how
to accept the bitter truth as though it were a gift.
We did not worship death. Above the tracks and the cement 
we watched the angels. We loved them. We lit the lamp 
in the library. We called evil by its name 
and good, knowing, how hard it was to tell them apart.
We carry the lamp into the darkness and that is probably enough.

Translated by Laima Sruoginis



SHEREMETJEVO, 1977

Having passed the chill of customs, the line of armed soldiers, 
Having climbed the stairs to the ragged paradise of hard currency,
I realized that I hadn't waved to those few who would remain behind.

Before the plane had even left the ground they had become shadows for all time,
Echoes in the abyss of the telephone, addresses in a forgotten book, 
And that was the one and only miracle of our times.

I knew that their voices would crumble and their words would become dust,
Their familiar faces would shrivel in the twilight of photographs, 
Shelves and lamps would finally take their place.

I did not know if it was me or them who was in Persephone's prison. 
From my little table I gazed out at the flat plain beyond my window – 
My lost body, like the local poet had said.

There, beside the power plant, the torn sun will soon hang,
The trams will chirr, splattering mud onto the boulevards of March, 
The ponds around Great Georgian street will begin to thaw.

Over there, once, near the many-windowed postwar wall 
A dead man lay prostrate, the police dispersed the crowds, 
And I did not understand just then what it meant.

I've been given enough time from now on to understand – 
Twelve, twenty, maybe even thirty years 
In darkened rooms on spacious and dark continents.

And almost in that very place the key creaked when I knocked,
And almost in that very place I experienced how a line could sparkle, 
Out of which the midnight trees and snow brightened.

A foreign land was entrusted to me like a temporary body, 
Up to the Barents Sea is the damp land of those who lost – 
Airplane crosses over an unseen city.

Translated by Laima Sruoginis



* * *

I haven't lived here for a long time 
And like a dumb brick island 
Every day from afar I go around 
This empty riverside neighborhood 
Without pavement, glass, and locks.

Its streetlights' are filled with darkness, 
Its rooms – with days and sleep. 
Allotted within the voices of objects, 
It is between the truth and untruth, 
Like a reflection, like an alter ego,

Like a body, discovered in a dream, 
Or belated news,
Rinsed by several seas – 
That is why I am frightened 
By its form, material, and size.

Whosoever remains in that house 
Inherits a dangerous fate 
And guards a disposable land 
From dusk to dusk
Above the present and emptiness?

Translated by Laima Sruoginis



* * *

It is time to leave my friends behind in poor cities.
An infertile light blesses them on floating lamps.
The night loses us and the road to Aukštadvaris finds us – 
Its coarse pine bark, pitch, and needled sky.

Yes, it is thy space that thickens and grows so unexpectedly,
Thou brought us together, thou bringest us further away from the conclusion.
Thou narrowest my pupils, widening my vision
To the hand's shadow and the blind tarpaulin damp.

And if my generation is not destined to win the race, 
Let it be enough for the first, who will not live long, 
His daily bread and his unusual fate, 
His daily salt and his unusual water.

Let his perfect voice, breaking, find me,
An atonement for lies, the beginning of misfortune and freedom –
The way that the water of the Nemunas should be blackened and sweet,
That, to the delta, the waning moon should steam and swim.

Translated by Laima Sruoginis



A COMMENT

First of all, even if it is hard, love the language,
degraded in newspaper columns, obituaries filled with lies,
in stuffy dark bedrooms, the secret agent's typing, the screams in the market-place,
in the trenches, the stench of hospital rooms, third-rate theaters,

interrogator's cells, on the walls of bathroom stalls.
In gray buildings where the bottom of the stairwell
Is guarded by tin nets, controlled not by man, but by winks 
chosen by the century, when the order comes for you to die,

practically dismantled, hoarse, filled with sound 
and fury. Therefore, love the language, 
exiled to the earth together with us, because 
maybe even then the first word

lives in it, having been born in another universe.
It was given us, so that we might be distinguished from clay, 
Palms, and the thrush, and maybe even from angels. 
Naming them, we see objects clearly.

They who try to return to a lost space,
by cleaning up language, must understand,
that they will almost certainly lose. Because the door, 
as it is known, disappears faster than you move closer.

A gift is like a loss; what is constructed
will soon be demolished. In that same way, you will not
step into a foreign paradise (because there are many paradises).
When one reaches it the traces of one's feet are erased and the key lost.

They say, you are only a tool. A power, that would blind you,
were you to look in its face, dictates your actions.
It's not completely like that. You will climb Jacob's ladder in your dreams,
groping, concentrating your strength, that you don't have, not protected by the net,
while someone from above will greet you (or maybe not greet you). Sometimes,
having shoved you aside, he rebuilds several words, 
changes your voice, checks your syntax, the degree. 
It happens rarely, but it does happen,

and then you feel that what you have created – is good,
because the letters float along on a page, like the sludge
in a river, and suddenly the bush brightens, the shoreline, the city. 
And who will read it (if they read it at all) is not for you to know.

Translated by Laima Sruoginis



THANKSGIVING DAY

The pond on the slope is stagnant and metallic.
The horses nibble at the prickly lawn.
Eight women busy themselves around the table
In the center of Autumn and the Great Plains. The Ohio 
Weekend is saturated with dew.
In the valley the maple turns a rust color (or is it a covered wagon? – 
I can't tell). The light thickens in
Wisconsin, Dakota, Oregon

And Orion. The Lord's avalanche
Over lost land. While the barren space 
Crumbles the heart in rhythmic beats. 
Let us give thanks for this new land.
It is too dense for me to see through, but it is alive.
I am too dense for it to see through me, but I have to admit 
That an old dog would recognize Odysseus 
More easily here than in his homeland.

I give thanks for the answers that
My sleep-deprived brain can't keep up with, 
For the new water that I drink,
For the grass that will be. For the patient wind 
Above them. For a grave in a foreign land.
For the not-so-terrible weight of foreign stones, 
For non-being. For the fact that from non-being 
Thou canst recreate being. If only thou wouldest too.

For the music of black spheres. For the fact
That this day has contained it all. 
Accustomed to being in shadow, objects
Copy themselves onto this side of the Atlantic. 
Three clocks pause in the corners. 
The retina, not afraid of being mistaken, 
Finds the lock, the table cloth, the stars
In the same places where they had been in childhood.

Translated by Laima Sruoginis



CAMERA OBSCURA

Beside the house that I loved once, dirt chokes the plantain, 
under the sphere of the sunset the park reeks of gasoline. 
Before day break it is still misty, I can still change my mind, 
turn away from the roof, with its fractured tile

and its shadows on the cement. Who can make out this cipher?
Who can make the marks into letters, the cloud-clusters into signals? 
Who, overtaking our being, tells the difference between the real and the unreal, 
lights the lamp in the hall, emanates from the glass of the mirror,

turns the small handle, splitting time, shuffling fate,
and still believes, that like the Lord, out of the primal ore, 
he can extract his voice's eternity, a sooty crumb of essence 
out of crackling, rustling, and rippling?

You, or me, or the two of us? The radio chokes with ether, 
the broken alarm clock won't wake us from the present,
and thousands of shorelines away the bomber has awakened – 
the pathfinder, whose rockets will lead us to the earth.

A word is left for remembrance (I haven't uttered it yet),
the character forces its way into the reticulum, the echo trembles –
in this way the pupil marks the border between one cosmos and the next,
between the incest of skies and the darkness of the arteries.

The plantain rasps the clay, Persephone puts the grain to sleep, 
like thirty years ago the heart of the lock rattles 
beside the house that I loved once, where we were befallen 
by the black angel, February, a premature non-existence.

Translated by Laima Sruoginis



DEDICATED TO AN INFANT

Fate recalls only fate,
Death – only death. A child's experience 
Is other, probably simpler: 
He matures, repeating Genesis.
In his cradle as though in the manger at Bethlehem, 
He feels light, and soon darkness, 
Learns to differentiate a vault from an abyss,
The continent edges away from the infinity of the sea 
(Congruent with his mother). Later 
He recognizes grass, the sun, and the moon, 
The trout's rainbow and the army 
Of crows, wandering the skies above, 
With halting sensations he tames 
Mid-day chestnut columns 
The black alder, snow, haddock, a motor, 
A dreaming household wolf 
And the wolf in the forest, which remains
An indefinable fear. That is how the word comes close, 
And the consciousness grows together with the word, 
Repeating in a high space "let it be", 
Inserting itself into a strange meaning 
Suddenly suspicious, that the dark – is ourselves, 
Although the light exists above us. 
From then on his kinship with the world 
Is stronger than with those who begot him. 
A secret strand ties him to the mesons, 
Coal and diamonds, to the Amazon, 
Mercury, the archangel, Birnam's 
Cruel forest and the doe of Cerynea. 
Objects bow before him, and others 
Rise up to him. In the resonant wasteland 
Between paradise lost and the trumpet 
He awakens, brimming with the universe, 
Together being both the sand clock and the sand, 
As George Herbert had said. And often 
It seems to him that he is near that threshold 
Where lines cross, notes concur,
And – it would seem that – being reaches its goal. 
And we who experienced that Genesis before, 
Can only answer with death.

We are older than he and we know already 
That notes wear out, that lines break off, 
That air's chambers don't hold sound 
And that writing crumbles on paper. 
Only rarely, by accident do we meet 
In blind hope, compassion for objects 
In memory. It tries to stand in for 
Immortality, but not does not always 
Manage. Let us give thanks for that too. 
Whatever you say, it gives strength,
When we descend into the valley, surrounded 
By night, about which it is better to be silent, 
Because we still do not know if God 
Is there upon the face of the deep.

Translated by Laima Sruoginis



A PORT IN NEW ENGLAND

Not the sea, but a blighted mist, cement ingots,
scraps of iron, between darkened carmine that 
spurts through occasionally into the air. Drowned in 
rotting sludge, a breakwater juts out – a refuge for the gulls. 
The onlooker waits where the sand and the channel join 
until the red on this side of the masts' bedlam dies down. 
And then it will be time to go home. But where is his house? 
Here or on the other side of the Atlantic? Or in the mountains,
where an avalanche strips the slope naked? Or beyond the suburb's firs,
where sunken cellars reign? Or in a body that is not getting any younger 
and refuses to submit? Or maybe in doubt 
that you'd lived at all? Or maybe in the certainty that you too will disappear?
Or in that rust-poisoned environment,
Or in that glance that finds symmetry, consonance, measure even here?

Translated by Laima Sruoginis



UŽUPIS

In the confusion of linden trees, before the stone embankment, 
above the rushing current, similar to the Tiber, 
with two young bearded men I drink "Gilbey's". 
Twilight, the ringing of glasses, and smoke. 
I don't know them. I knew their parents.

What of it. The generations pass. The dictaphone 
rustles and catches. My companions
are interested in exactly what I was interested in once: 
Whether suffering and mercy have any meaning 
and whether art will survive if there are no rules.

I was like them, until I was destined to a strange 
fate, no better than anyone else's,
and I know that evil never dies,
but that blindness can be enlightened,
and that a poem's lines are worth more than a dream.

In the summer I'm often up before the dawn
and without fear I feel how the time is drawing near 
when the new generations will inherit the dictionary, 
the clouds, the ruins, salt, and bread, 
and I will be left with nothing, except freedom.

Translated by Laima Sruoginis



POEM, CONCERNING THE END

That's why deserts manage to clear up
And the spider overcomes sand,
Why no one will say we survived
Where a ratified air presses down,
Or go to sleep with a sprinkling of tears,
Giving out salt for change.
Nor say it was on the outskirts of noon
The trees of poetry grew tall.

Their branches drop off for travelers
And lean down all night over bridges,
While growing more distant, insisting
No one speak out for long.
For a word held back since yesterday
Can't be turned into human speech,
Not with flotillas adrift inside the lungs
And the fingers transforming to ferns.

The seed settles deeper and deeper,
Then cracks to demolish hell.
It was the plane geometry of sweat
In iceberg and poplar-seed
A rejuvenated Braque found,
Though an echo at daybreak balanced it out
With the opening barrage in the names
For Schara, Teberda, Tegenek.

That's why there's no more need, it's not even right,
Forgiven and condoned for ages as it has been
To keep plunging the landscape like an anchor
Deep in a darkened valleybed.

With winters forgiven, along with the rioting,
The elmtrees' inscrutable crests,
And with stars like moss under your head,
It still is hard, hard to sleep.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



* * *

Day closes down, above the peninsula.
Such squirming heat, such a rough luster to the horizon,
The build-up of foam, wrecked at the shoreline,
Revives just as the flame waving in grass does,

No less than the flatness of plains or the depth of bays,
Their dim language weighing more than ours
With memory mute. It's as if out of some stronghold dungeon
A spring breaks free from the core of sense.

Nature overpowers us. Salt breaks the lock.
Like the angel of judgment, a beaconlight speaks out.
As the sand, roaring, floods in by the doors,
And dark clouds weigh down the whole earth.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



IN MEMORY OF THE POET (ONE VERSION)

	We'll meet up again, in Petersburg
			Osip Mandelstam

Did you return to a place that was promised
In the city's plan, its copy and skeleton?
A blizzard's bobbed off with the Admiralty,
Its geometric paint-job faded
In the flattening process.

With power switched off,
Shadow is born, out of an icy ghost,
While rust-covered locomotives skulk
Down by Avenue Izmailov.

It's the same streetcar, the same worn coat.
The asphalt barely lifts that paper scrap,
And a chill out of the last century
Floods the whole station.
Roaring, the sky
Seals shut. Decades grow pale,
Dark cities go by like thick fog,
Gestures recur like a gift, and yet
No human is ever born twice.

He goes off into the February morning
That holds Rome North in a rigid embrace
And enters another space, gauging his pace
Close to the hour of snow.
The she-wolf's frozen-solid cave,
Madhouse, prison and mud all call for him.
Black Petersburg is known to him
That once was spoken of.

Measure and harmony can't be reborn,
The boards crackling a warm swell
From a hearth that time ignited,
Yet there's a hearthfire that is timeless,
And optical science has made estimates of fate:
Its essence in happy comparability,
At times even in simple meetings,
And in continuing, eternal forms.

No mirror to reality: a break, clear through.
An island, rooted in a foaming stream,
That stands for unrealized paradise
Comes out of the shell of live speech,
As in a wash of clouds, above ship's stack,
The pigeons spin in a gigantic wheel,
Not daring to make out Ararat
From an ordinary hill turned green.

Cast off! It's time for us to sail.
While rocks split up, and lies drain off,
The one witness left is art
To brighten the deepest winter nights.
Grass with its blessing does the ice in.
Mouths of rivers search out the dark seas.
Now a simple, senseless word rings out,
Nearly as senseless as death.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



* * *

Slow down and stop. The sentence falls apart.
The ridge of rooftops fits in with the dawn.
The snow is talking, the fire backing it up.

The pendulum swing diminishes,
Its lead weight brushing the floor.
Slow down and stop. The sentence falls apart.

Where the world was, an etching glows instead.
A playful mirror shines it back.
The snow is talking, the fire backing it up.

The convict goes back into his cell
As prison bars wade out into the sky.
Slow down and stop. The sentence falls apart.

A fragment of space, a grain of time
Encloses our bodies like an orb.
The snow is talking, the fire backing it up.

All that will vanish reaches for your face,
And there's no angel at the back of your head.
Slow down and stop. The sentence falls apart.
The snow is talking, the fire backing it up.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



HALFWAY THROUGH THIS LIFE OF OURS

	In memory of Konstantin Bogatiriov

Middle age came over me.
I was alive but learning not to be.
Death was like one of the family,
Staking claim to most of the apartment.
I tried gradually to get death used to me,
Asking it outright not to touch me,
And at dawn I still had a view (so far as I knew)
On the loveliest town in Eastern Europe:
Where iron waits to come into its own,
Swamp bristles rotting cattails in the mist,
By means of rock, truncheon, locomotive
Or what's likely best, gasoline.
I ate, drank, slept death.
I tried to give it aims and reasons, sometimes even
Forgetting it was there. And yet, for being human,
It's something you almost can't get used to.
I was turning the key in the hall. My heart,
Its pulse gone, was a weight in my chest.
Though it is true, even under that regime
It could have been an accidental death.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



CANTO ELEVEN

"How, Elpenor, did you get over to the land of shades so fast?"
Odyssey XI, 57

I'm not sure it happened. Through the branches
We suddenly saw one vast deserted harbor,
A concrete pier showing pale and calm
In shade above the muddy water,
Split pile-stakes poking out from the surf.
A wind, starting up from level stretches,
Had steered the sand false, in whorls far darker
Than smashed ship's ribbing. It had
The wild air skewered onto masts, all
Wound up in ropes, then heaved down hard
On the whole cove, each thistle and dune.
Heat fluttered the horizon
Like a flag in shreds. There was a boy
Poling a raft knocked together out of disintegrating boards
Across a low stream. The way things looked,
He should have been glad for company.
We saw no one, other than him, on shore.
Something told us this place was just one more
Of many that bring Ithaca to mind.

We were right in the day's fire-core.
The war long past, the journey since
Had crammed our brains full, just like the wave
That snuffs a careless swimmer's breath.
The crunching underfoot was shell, bone,
Pitted rock. Afterwards we lay
Out in the grass, with every trace of nature gone,
Though nature had, far longer back, lost track of us.

A vaulting sunrise. Hissing salt
An unseen moon urged on
Replays the cycle, a tide the soggy corks float on.
Out on iron-clad timbers
Mollusks flash in the sun.
All that darkness a patient gravity
Zeroes in with each surge! One way foam echoes
Is half in memory's cave, half exposed here
Between the dredger's backbone and the pier.

Something gently rasping crept past us.
Shouldering his oar, one voyager
Was walking inland, where no one ever saw
An oar before. Out by the base of a dune
A sand-mole beamed its beady glare
On a trident rusting in sand.

There is no wave. It's some force greater
Than the sum of drops, every split second
The water slips further back from itself, a hairline
Island, death's equator, the grass palmed under
In turning back, in changing over. No history or myth
Had ever made us an offer like this.

Once we changed course, space changed.
First by some trick of perspective,
As if we had each sand-grain shining in our pat]
Under a magnifying glass, or saw whole
Outcrops of rock through the wrong end of a scope.
Like sounds in some undefined recital hall,
The contours things had fell off. For once
We all agreed it was the heat, so we were not
The least surprised when we happened on our friend
Down by the warehouse wall, the very first of those
You get to see only after death.

He was the first one

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



SESTINA

It's about six, and the icy roadway
Slants off to the North. Chains
Clink the tires. A smothered, steely echo
Glimmers like a laketop, up ahead.
Weightless, wounds showing, the March snow
Still tries to cover a decimated forest.

Like a raft, that's parted an immobile forest,
Staring comes to a standstill. It's the roadway
Throws me off in reflecting itself many times over, in the snow
And the birches in monotonous chains.
In sheer fog a well-pole rises, just ahead
Of an empty homestead, where the rest is all echo

And air clots. One meaningless echo,
Unreal, yet loud and clear throughout the forest.
A graphite mirror shows black aimed head
On, up into an immensity of darkness. Our appointed way
And heaven-sent chains
Are an invisible, though potent, snow.

Spring's dotage is attested by the snow,
With hearing disrupted by a many-faceted echo,
And like a pond broken from its chain
Blind thought seeps through into the forest.
A full gas tank is no help, neither is a white roadway,
The track glinting clear, up ahead.

Uncreated chaos comes up, straight ahead.
A star in the rough, such rabid snow
Snarling to deck the whole plain – feisty, on the way
In – that shadow, reflection, image and echo
Totally fill the ruins of Arden Forest,
And the changes they undergo are nothing but chains.

Are we meant to harden under these chains
Of yours? Things elemental stand out, dead ahead.
I will leave that dour forest
Back there, with each tree both captive and safe, now snow
Piles in and each word is replaced by empty echo
As everything ends. Maybe even the road

Is all chains. I can find no way
Out of the forest, with earth in the rigors of snow.
We've turned enemies, head on. All you are is an echo.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



IN A STATION OF THE BERLIN METRO

Now winter's seal on Europe shrinks and buckles
Broad asphalt fields break open like chestnuts.
Space minus its overbearing menace is Berlin's
Insular winter in bone, cardboard, concrete,

Where we see heaven reversed. Street patrols.
Blinking blue lights. A wallpatch bulging with pride.
The vacuum lacks direction. Spooled thread leads to
No other existence. High over Europe, snow beats its wings.

After the miles and seasons you've logged, it's more or less
The same where you put in next. Whether at Jericho or Mitte,
Termites are hard at work, and cities change their layout.
Still, their dull rumble can't withstand the trumpet's blast.

Step back into the past for a glimpse of tomorrow:
No solid human shadow half-sunk in dirty snow is
Meant to witness the cardboard boxcar just hauled in
At Hallesches Tor, from nowhere and beyond.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis



SYLLABIC STANZAS

Turn in at the gate a while, on your way through, stranger.
The star above the pines is rising from a sullen
dream-crammed bed. The valley of shadows is dammed in by
a solid density of towers composed, like you,
of consciousness and nothing, fire and clay, each in
itself as timeless as a well-spring, balm-leaf, or rose.
Gravel your foot dislodges knocks against a wall; out
beyond the gutter, looping alleyways unravel
into a lost, depleted world that fit in snug once
between the shearing embankment and a train platform:

the spanning scene, retaining old guilt and old limestone
where a meagerness of neon blunts the vivid air,
has been charmed into a key rusting in your pocket,
clammy unearthly sound, diminished eagerness; far
more remote than Saturn, rarely ever dreamed of,
yet you will contrive to go over it with your eyes
closed (on a desolate day, though nighttime still is best);
you could compile a thriving human glossary
from the whimsies of its wind, a vinyard of vowels
out of a lashing downpour and the cloister archway.

It was all you did speak of. The radar of the Lord
touched its jumble of crosses. You could not manage to
lose the way. If one asked, your likely response might be:
,,Not in this world." All you had learned of gall, betrayal,
despair unexpectedly prolonged and outright war
with former intimates, burial sites and cross-nailed
boards on doorframes, was the price to pay for visiting
Ithaca. You tracked its inaudible lapse into
a moldering void. All who may not have existed
yet persist in being. The keynote revives when struck,

confining horizons jerk apart, mirrors shatter,
as if to let you glimpse the realm where no light shines.
A black-tinged leaf swirls above the torrent and time.
Some twenty others drifting on by have dropped into
the lightness of their being: reflection and silence.
The gouged-out bricks thus exposed are rasping to the touch;
the brickwork gap shows pale, where it lines up with a star.
Now it is only the sandy, rain-drilled provincial
hills ranged at random, a local baroque you come to
envision when you dream what death or heaven might be.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis

Tomas Venclova was born in Klaipėda just before World War II. He began publishing poems while still in his teens. On graduating Vilnius University, he stayed on to teach there. Because of his outspoken membership in Lithuanian Helsinki Group which monitored Soviet violations of human rights in Lithuania, Venclova was threatened with a number of sanctions, but finally was allowed to emigrate. He has since settled in the United States and is currently teaching at Yale. Although a widely published poet, Venclova is not very prolific. Sign of Speech was the only volume of his poetry published in Lithuania, prior to his leaving the country in 1977. Two more books consisting of poems and translations have appeared in the United States, along with a volume of polemical essays which reflect his involvement in dissident politics. A retrospective collection of his poems was published in Vilnius in 1992. Venclova's spirited re-engagement with the modes and subjects of a cosmopolitan classical tradition has influenced a substantial generation of Lithuanian poets. His dry witty style is marked by a highly controlled irony which holds out an effective resilience against the bleak eventuality of his appraisals. By the necessarily high-contrast backlight of historical consciousness, his understatement is luminously Audenesque. Venclova is a vigorous essayist and has published articles in English and Polish, as well as Lithuanian, on cultural and political topics. His extensive and highly original study, Aleksander Wat (Yale, New Haven), was published in 1996.