Poems from the poetry book The Taste of Water (Vandens skonis)
Translated by Rimas Užgiris
Lost Gloves
When I was a child, my mom sewed
a rubber tie onto my gloves
so I wouldn’t lose them
she did the right thing
because later, when there was no one
to sew on the rubber ties
I always lost them
the path of my life
is strewn with lost
and lonely gloves
now I’ve grown old
and almost never
lose my gloves
maybe this is
the meaning and purpose
of life:
learning how to hold on
to what isn’t tied down
Harvest Festival
today is a special day
at the sanatorium
it’s the harvest festival
where parents come to see
how beautifully their little consumptives
dance and sing
I received a glittering white crown
(green crowns made from kefir bottle caps
white crowns made from a milk bottle caps)
my slender doe-eyed partner
with a green crown sang:
I will be the sky’s regina –
Tereshkova, Valentina
I also sang something about
wanting to be an cosmonaut
and how I almost already am
then we all returned from space
to dance on the earth in a circle
before we sang again
this time it was about vegetables
and the song ended with some words
that required all of us to rub our bellies
as we sang:
the vegetable soup will be so yummy
for our little tummies
and then all the daddies and mommies
smiled and clapped
and the cosmonauts and vegetables
took their bows and said:
thank you for coming honorable guests
and for playing the parts of happy people
so believably
I Saw ABBA When I Was Twelve
I saw ABBA
when I was twelve
miracles would sometimes happen
with the right environmental conditions
the Swedish television signal
would make it across the Baltic Sea
it would reach this small occupied country
where I lived under the infallible
guidance of General Secretary
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev
so there I was flipping through TV channels
although there were only two
Moscow central
and Vilnius local
I turned the dial around and around
watching the televised snow
it was a dirty brown autumn that year
maybe it was November
and then I saw them
those people from another world
there was no sound but they were singing
and smiling and they gleamed in vivid colors
on our black and white TV
even without sound I could understand
everything they were singing
because they were singing it all to me
a lonely child on the other side of the sea
they sang about a world were there is
a Karlsson-on-the-roof and Nils, but no Brezhnev
a world where there is a Pippi Longstocking
but there is no Brezhnev at all
and one of those young men, Bjorn I think
winked at me and said:
kid, the human world is full of sex and music
and the human world has no Brezhnev
they smiled at me, nodded to me
and sang about how nothing has disappeared
about how everything is still waiting for me
on the other side of the sea
and everything is
just as you said, Bjorn
Brezhnev died
Lithuania became free
and one day I was standing on deck
gazing at the houses on the skerries
and I thought about that child
about how I grew up
and sailed across the sea
When My Childhood Came to an End
I can pull those stitches out myself, I say
why go there for just that, doesn’t it hurt?
well, yes, it hurts a bit, says Mom
can you really take them out yourself?
my childhood came to an end that day
rather late
I was 54
my father had just died
and my mom was growing weaker by the day
I sterilized the pincers and scissors
I pulled out each thread, cleaned the wound
gazed at the scar on her belly
the place from which I was born
where instead of me now cancer grows
I finally raised my eyes and
Mom was looking at me with a smile –
thank you, my little falcon
she had never spoken to me that way before
Oh, Mom, if only you knew how unlike a falcon I am
I can’t do anything anymore, this world isn’t for me
I’ve always felt so absurdly foreign here
but I never ever felt so powerless as I do now
three months later
when we gathered to say goodbye
at Mom’s bed
she could hardly speak
one of us said –
Mom, we all love you very much,
and that felt like such a painful truth
then Mom started to whisper something
with her parched lips, repeating it non-stop
insistently, as if it were something infinitely
important that she still wanted to tell us
until finally, in some way
other than by hearing, I understood
what she had been trying to say:
I love you too
I love you too
I love you too
Evolution
there’s this creature
of the sea
called a cuttlefish
when you scare it
or hurt it
or it just happens
to get lonely and sad
the cuttlefish
discharges a cloud of ink
that looks just like
another cuttlefish
and then it isn’t so afraid anymore
in that boundless sea
it isn’t so lonely
once upon a time
all of us presently erect bipedal beings
crawled out of the sea
and those crawling lobe-finned fish
gave birth to auto mechanics
pianists and pickpockets
and Bollywood dancers
but not everybody, no
those sad and lonely cuttlefish
gave birth to writers
The Taste of Water
have you noticed how those human rituals:
the public and the intimate, the fancy and the ascetic,
are really all a bit comedic?
mine are like that too
I remember when things were quite bad for me
so bad that you just can’t hide
and I drank water every morning
I would pour myself a glass and talk to it
either in my thoughts or out loud
maybe I wasn’t actually crazy
maybe I just had this feeling
that it would help me
I would say – thank you, water
for being here to drink and for tasting so good,
and I would drink it down with big gulps
I know, it’s funny, but it helped,
and generally it’s the silly and comedic things
in life that help the most, while the serious
and intelligent things don’t help at all
now I just drink water when I’m thirsty,
in silence
because now, at this moment
everything is fine
water still tastes good.
I am still alive.
