Poems from the poetry book Part Two (Antra dalis)

Translated by Rimas Uzgiris

***

I’m trying to remember the theme: a flaming field,
which we set alight because the film needed mystery:
smoldering sedges and grass, smoked out spiders –
and from afar, the landscape looked just right.
We didn’t need characters, relationships, decorations –
just black and white in the cracked camera of reality.
I never wanted to act or direct. My camera operator’s
career ended with the first reel of my first film:
a flaming field, the quivering soil of the past,
and our splintering nails trying to hold on – holding on.

The Script I Never Wrote

The image came out blurry: we didn’t know anything
about contrasts, color temperatures and saturation.
Our sun-washed faces gave the illusion of depth.
Contrast is contradiction, contrast is the difference
I try to develop in the first scene of the first act.
When you entered the frame, you took what was dying from me:
the skeleton of a black swift, the petrified molt
of a dragonfly, the distorted thought that our hopeless stories
are needed for the plots of other people’s lives…
That I’m the main character who can’t leave the frame.

A person in a line is prosaic. I’m trying to remember:
I was probably made to wait for an electric burner…
The line stretching thousands of miles – nobody
really knows what’s been shipped in, but the rumors say
it’s worth the wait. In that Soviet era, our parents
waited for apartments, jobs, justice – while we were entrusted
with trivialities – herring, knitting needles, self-respect.
They learned to suffer and to hate – while we learned
patience. “Nothing Left” says the hand-written sign
on the storefront window, but we don’t leave –
a thousand-mile procession continues to treads in place,
wanting to be sure that there, on the other side of us,
there is really nothing there.

Our history needed a voice: like the sound of a
suffocating mole, a skylark’s melting song, or God’s.
Any voice from outside the frame, a voice to speak
about a moveable flame, about the lizard’s singed tail.
Wagtails leaving their nests, the crackle of exoskeletons.
We need a voice that sits us down in burning hatcheries
where we wait for what is born from the fire
that spreads into peat bogs from memory’s smoldering forest
whose decay we use to anoint our fathers’ faces.
What can be born from the blackened river, from casting
doubt on God’s existence, from waiting for His sign
to show us that we ourselves exist?

from “3”

Someday they’ll understand why we locked ourselves in the bathroom.
Even now they aren’t sure if I’m in there writing, or you’re dictating.
We believe that flowing water carries away cupidity
and tenderness. We don’t believe they’re listening to us.
I remember when we met, and you said, “The body is only
the first act.” But the body is also the words which you
dictate to me with your eyes closed. At first, it was odd
to see you without a single drop of despair – waters flow
within your eyes. Don’t be afraid when I lock myself up alone,
when I decide to read about everything from the beginning:
deserts and floods, Assyrians and Babylonians, Ishtar
shedding her clothes. When the two of us stand facing
each other, you are probably the shape of the second act,
with the quickly fading contour of the finale quivering in
a river of want. When you unlock the bathroom door
and quietly slip away, fish swim in your wake.

The Ground

Marijampolis,^[1] Maria’s land, or poor, infertile
land – the Poles and Belarusians can’t agree
as to what cracks beneath our feet. Was it
black earth or sand we threw in our eyes
when we played war? I still remember field trips
where the locals told us about hopelessness:
whatever you sow in this land – it will all be
in vain. We sowed nonetheless, never lacking
food or water. The morning news announced
that Mantas Kvedaravičius^[2] had just been killed
in Mariupol^[3] while making his second film. Tonight
I think our poems about the war are a hopeless land,
an attempt to say that no one will be forgotten,
that in this land, we are all connected to each other,
that in reality, there is no connection between Marijampolis
and Mariupol, except our respective southeast orientations,
our blackened sand, our history that can’t be assembled
anew – even when it is forgotten.

He was driving a cargo-carrying mini-bus. His partner
riding shotgun helped him load the bodies – they drove
over a hundred miles a day with their silent passengers
who never complained about the lack of space.
She moved in with us, asking first on the phone if
she could bring her mother and son. She never
complained about the lack of space even when
she couldn’t find privacy when he finally rang.
You know what’s the hardest thing for me?
he would say, Not the separation, the torn up
forest roads that fight on our side. The hardest
is to listen to the phones ringing in their pockets.
It’s hard to hear how the women breathe, not knowing
that we have lost the signal. The hardest is to hear
and not to answer when you call wanting to ask,
What’s new? while really hoping I’ll hear
the crackle of your voice in my pocket.

What will we take when we have to run?
I see you rummaging through the house,
searching for the kids’ favorite toys. You don’t notice
me putting them back, wanting to tell you we won’t
have to run. We already ate all the long-lasting food
over the summer, spent the cash, and our IDs
grew tired of our fingers. If we need to run
and you can’t reach me, let’s meet by that house
I showed you when we drove by, remember?
At the forest’s edge, down by the river.
I know the people well enough who lived there
before the fire. I’m trying to remember the plot:
we exchanged our faces and teeth, were stuck there,
having become the flood from which we ran.

1. A village in Vilnius Region, southeastern Lithuania.

2. Mantas Kvedaravičius (1976-2022) was a Lithuanian documentary filmmaker, shot to death by Russian soldiers in Ukraine while making his film, Mariupol 2.

3. Mariupol is a city in southwest Ukraine, bombed to smithereens by Russia’s occupying forces.