Poems from the poetry book Groundwaters (Gruntiniai vandenys)
Translated by Eglė Elena Murauskaitė
***
The water turns clear under blackening sheets of the city.
Time de-rusted by waterweed emerald flames.
Throw a linen of white on the ramparts, take pity
Let an underground serpent approach you, shedding its scales.
Slow he slivers through Baroquan church carcasses
Across toothless skulls of the town of ye old
Like a funeral wreath he’ll curl up on the canvas
Interweaving your body and soul.
Frightful you’ll scream – though the myth has forewarned thee
As you push to the limit a body unversed yet in change.
Slim waterweed fingers comb your hair into threads
Dressing the wounds in hence spun silks of green.
I cannot explain, I’m ashamed of these states of my being
I’m no Kabala student, and no chastened poet of the Earth generation.
It is only I feel the tears roll through the drains of the city
And a gravelly voice of a mythical reptile rise with reverberation.
Please don’t judge, do not chase me away, upon glimpsing the slime of my skin
And the dark sands of time on my face.
May your ears hold forever what my forked tongue has whispered within
As I take off my scales on the fresh linen base.
Carbuncle Stone
A fiery carbuncle stone
Like a simmering ember it glows
Such is the love of God…
Konstantinas Sirvydas[1]
I should like to take you someday
to the underground vaults of this city,
where beneath the steel-clad enclosures
the fiery carbuncle stone glows.
I’d like you to grasp then and there:
this city’s an animal’s armor,
forged through the seven long centuries,
never once asking the beast.
These squares are the old river deltas:
their swelling mouths meeting beneath
the blankets of stone – without spilling
a tributary drop for us, no more.
These streets pass by burial mounds,
piled over the embers of memory.
Gray, cowering heaps slouch across them
inner fires laid out for a wake.
Go ahead, touch those rugged defenses
with your perfectly sensitive fingers
for the beast has survived underneath it
and the stone grows warm under armor.
Manor Resurrected
Woe to those departing that do not return[2]
Suddenly, the sitting room grew dark.
A storm was crossing the lake, approaching from Lithuania.
The color of water grew closer to tin.
An old Lithuanian cook, hailing from Žagarai village,
was dishing out cold beetroot soup for us.
I watched the people at the table
over the edge of a crystal decanter.
Playing the same cards as had been played a hundred years ago.
Discussing reforms that had never taken place.
Not knowing where to turn, as the crowds turned ever more psychotic.
Suddenly, I felt like a student from St. Petersburg
carrying but a measly bag of books
invited to attend a salon at this estate
Anno Domini 1914.
“Let there be progress,”
said a demon, and with a sudden bang
and lighting, down to the bottom of the lake went
the paintings, the precious porcelain, medieval manuscripts,
and dry Burgundian wine. Then the devil turned to the student:
“Is this what you wanted?” He trembled, dumbfounded.
His Soviet antecedents would surmise
dry wine to be some sort of powder.
Who pours the crimson Burgundian, once more,
from a crystal decanter, is it real?
Who passes a plate of cold beetroot soup,
discussing Lithuanian-Polish relations,
just like a hundred years ago?
Who’s serving coffee, thick as honey,
in Saxonian porcelain, who
is reciting the artefacts of a sunken manor, who
actually serves at the table?
“Let them come back now,”
says the demon of a glistening lake.
“May the vicious circle spin on.”
And up, from the thorn-sprouting depths,
rises a manor swallowed by earth.
And the student enters again,
wondering, eerily,
whatever comes next.
Childhood City
I never got to live anywhere but in the infinite
block districts, suspended above the ground.
As the breezes of spring would blow
the first white gull off a river, above the districts,
I’d fall head over heels, walking them home,
stutter, professing to them.
Then, in terror, I’d scream,
my love letters ravaged by a gull –
a young ego, threatening the body’s peace.
She lurked, quiet soil in the palm of a root,
yet, growing, hidden inside her
was a lizard scurrying beneath the foundation,
indescribable, elusive to render –
I’d only contour my palm in the notebook.
My coming of age was guarded by monsters, shattering
the winds – hundreds of square towers.
Homogenous wallpaper. Bony handrail,
breaking out in rashes of cigarette butt marks.
Homogenous creaking of mailbox iron.
Hundreds of successful careers churning through the same routine.
Hundreds of corners measured out to trap the primaeval lizard.
I never got to live anywhere else. Nor might I ever.
Only the infinite districts to fill my memory,
Turning into districts of dreams.
***
I’m airing the realm of affection. Picking the artefacts out,
leaving the whispers in. I open the windows
to let in some of that blue light of repentance
into this daily square, worn down by our ever-presence.
I unravel the contours of your body
like lace.
I am a spider
spinning my web in the room through the summer,
never dispelled, never catching a thing,
ever hungry, tasting
a moist secret.
Entwining that sticky web,
stinging with poisonous words,
I play dead upon your return
so I can tempt you
with pity.
An Apple with Bitterness
The courtyard of St. George’s Church in Vilnius[3]
I do not know who first tasted
the fruits of this apple tree.
Once a churchyard,
then – a library courtyard.
Now apples lie fallen amongst autumn leaves –
might be the sweet yellow kind, yet they’re small,
their russeted veins
bruised black.
They are bitterly strange,
as the palate learns in time:
like inhaling
the dolorous smoke of winter
in a coal-burning street,
as if the scent of ruin
had seeped into their yellow flesh.
Perhaps the dead
taste these rancid apples
on starry autumn nights
seated on their bench
in an insular yard, to remember.
Perhaps this tree has been cursed.
As the water might reach for its roots
through bodies long decayed,
through incunabula, crypts,
a cemetery raven might croak to this tree: anathema,
thou shalt ripen no sweetness
from the hearts of the dead.
And here I am, a century later,
tasting these fruits unaware.
A mist laced with the scent of wormwood
falls on the evening town.
A verdigris raven glides over the yards –
its voice, like a gong,
rings out upon plucking a kiss.
1. Konstantinas Sirvydas was a key literary figure in Baroque Lithuania, playing a formative role as a lexicographer, writer, and Jesuit preacher.
2. An entryway plaque at the restored Milosz manor in Krasnagrūda
3. During the Soviet era, the 18th-century Church of St. George in Vilnius was repurposed as a storage facility for restricted books and ancient manuscripts, including the Jewish manuscripts rescued from the Vilnius Ghetto. Known as the Book Palace, it remained closed to the general public for half a century. Although the books were removed in 2017, the church is currently under renovation and has limited accessibility.
