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Hollow Obscure

i am a father to myself
i was one
before i became him
mother?
who fed me when i was still sucking
by getting my milk from a dream
from the streets and the ghetto
that gave birth to this noise
i am a mother though
i fail to recall
any kind of coition
a pang that has brought all of us
to the thick certainty of the fog
i am a brother of my own
a sister and brother to the other
woman i can‘t recognize
(i have seen her one time)
i am
a baby of my own
conceived
in a sleepwalking dream
i do not know
when this life will come to its end
how will this kind of me disengage
from the world of his close ones
from the shape of his distant ones

hollow
obscure
axis denied

Eternal light

everything that surrounds you
a house for your habits
acorns
in the park of statues
you hear them fall down
these are the dead
going around the leap of the fire
torn out by someone
as soon as the weather got warmer
now the windows are covered with ice
under the ice
there are people of marshes
watching the clouds
moving all over the surface of snow
in the pace of a fisherman
their drying eyes
glow like ice-holes
the trails
guiding them forward
towards the pond
which is a residence for the critic
of all the possible things
nobody knows
whether the tongues of heat
leap in the shelf for his words
or just the two nails for your spangles
why do people live?
just for someone to note down
it is them
that got stuck in their things
they‘re not living here
with ice in their eyeballs
shine in the sun
like a clock
why has the time been invented?
so as things that surround you
were divided in parts that were equal
in the centre of their interior side
there is a little white statue
representing a tramp
nailed down in his house
on the shelf in his toilet
he‘s not shining
he‘s glowing
when the lamps are switched off
when the ice-holes of lives seen long ago turn on
when the dead
bound themselves to the land they got as a present
go away on their skis
circling all around the ponds
with some hope
some offences
some fury
with their usual daily distress
with the stems of calamus frozen in ice
with the faces of inula
with a fire of an eternal star figure
torn out in the city park

after that
all at once
the weather got warmer

translated from lithuanian by aleksandra fomina

Fullmoon Emptiness

the advent of light after dark
and semen travels on beyond the beliefs
the family genes
and phobias

but now only the streets travel on

leaving behind men and women
and all of those who are ignorance

deep down
in the machine’s demolished voices



Volcano Dweller

you cannot choose father      speech
or yourself
who are you?
you are moved by a woman’s heart
without it you feel like death
you have never lived under the sun
right before sunset
having her strike
you cannot give away
no prometheus
you are only the riot
it brings you at night
from the city’s magma
from the arms of the beloved
to your home
who are you?
and where is your      home?



Wedge

so I’ll finish here.
love and death start to recede,
with no location, character, plot.
only utility poles with cables,
only the ice posts overhead
and crystal splinters on rails
fill the private pressured knowledge.
behind you there is the same heart of the horizon,
which belongs to two people at once,
almost in the same coordinate,
almost the same entourage.
but how alien are these words.
I have grown them, being deaf,
I don’t know their meanings.
when I say them I hear them buzzing.
it’s a model of a dead train –
its painted-over hammer and sickle, the logic
is looming in the museum’s window.
it’s the ice post snapped from the oncoming echo
in the reddish horizon, it’s a wedge

Translated by Edgaras Platelis & Becka Mara McKay


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