No, the Nightingale of Dawn, No, Of Course, Yes!
how it trills on an old pulpit
in bushes on the Hill of Brides
how it trills – O horror – as if admiring
the moon in dead Roman ruins
admiring it so hopefully
with its paleness still able to arouse
admiration – arousing eternal yearning
for admiration, arousing the admiration of yearning
and how she admires – ex cathedra – the horror
of how lucidly and unfailingly she admires
the vanished town of Prienai in my adolescence
warbled into being this morning again
high above that old antique town – O my
Pyrenees of Prienai
arousingly she admires it – admiring
it like an Andalucian
as if
she were angry
***
it tousles foams stretches
into the hurrying cloud
it tramps teases cracks the roadside
with the fibres of its soles
it crosses itself and spreads
like a thousand fans in the wind
it flutters whistles rustles
and kneeling grabs at your wrists
at your tired sabot
shoelaces – you see, even it,
the penance of this
waving grass of the wastes,
has its pride
rabi
***
Autumn. A restive, mighty November – and here
the black sun of night has risen
above a few of Caligula’s cripples at the gates –
Vergils Salomés Fausts brothers from Judea
who croon champ stir and have no intentions of sleeping
howling in cellars about who sleeps with who and who without
who is drunk and who ostensibly alive hasn’t tasted ambrosia
who is in God’s kingdom and who was given the copper pipe
yes, autumn was like that –
swinging
blackly mendacious
our own
Again the Pang in my Palate
just rain and all rain
again by the mosque
so mighty and slanting
so incorrect
a different rain
from another time
once gave me
the correct answer
to an unanswerable
question –
so much serenity here
a park’s serenity
that hoarse, damp
laughter, that wind
that umbrella tumbling
on a November lawn –
unstoppable
unattestable
Foreigner (I)
a muddled piece of ice
on the banks of the Rhine
I don’t care
who you are nor why
but still
I understand you
despite not knowing
your tongue
knowing almost no
foreign tongue but, you know,
my own, the only one,
which is sometimes too much
Inclement October Night
how many years? probably the second hundred –
a street, a drugstore, a sign and of course, the streetlight
it tries – pouring that drab, murky light
into the rain, pouring and pouring
yet the light is as in Blok’s time:
there’s no more of it than then
***
under a full moon, through thick moonlight
three angels from Mount Lu came to visit
smiling, they showed me my soul
and seeing it – somehow sleepily, not deeply
I watched it going out like a pulsing ember
and what was strangest – it was standing in water
as in a strange land, the very top of a distant
drop – like in the palm of a hand
and all of creation stretched out in a band
below: multiplying, it swooned...
then it woke up, my soul did,
but not on Mount Lu
maybe on Mount Lu
but in Plato’s cave
On Life
tossing and turning sometimes at night maybe snoring
I pet a doggie in the morning and listen to the willows
moan about the rain the sunshower spending half the day
watching the flight of swallows and their agile art
my goodness and their wings cut so unerringly....
what? life?
let life live itself
it’s not stupid after all
it knows what it’s doing
Translated by Rimas Užgiris