LITUANUS LITHUANIAN QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES   Volume 47, No. 2 - Summer 2001 Editor of this issue: Violeta Kelertas ISSN 0024-5089 Copyright © 2001 LITUANUS Foundation, Inc.

NATIVITY

For Džoja in Vilnius

SHAWN KERRY KEYES*

It's a small pine, regal and green. In the dim light
without my glasses it could be a candelabra
carved from a prickly pear, or conceivably
just a limb of a tree. Idle speculations.
I know it's a pine tree because we decorated it
together while I arranged the scene around the manger
that consists, since I had no miniature replica to put there,
of a sleeping bag_r pillow, and mattress. And also
throughout the room there's the fragrant resin of pine
and myrrh each time the child calls his mother.
The bird from paradise, that Holy Spirit, a dove
here in the Bethlehem of the North,
perches on the top branch lapsing a bit
to the side under the force of its presence.
It will break before a gale, just as Jerusalem does
over and over. Tonight, however, wings have sheared
the clouds, all the feathers and thorny fleece
cover the earth like a moth-eaten jacket.
Red and silver balls dangle and sparkle
from the air, and most of the creatures around the child
in his mother's arms are turtles and birds.

Quite a lot of eggs also, two nests, a glass 
of vinegar, and a snake that's not at all repentant 
but that nevertheless must be enraptured and present. 
And there's a yapping dog that thinks it's treed the bird, 
and a poor, domesticated skunk, and a few other odds 
and ends that made the humanitarian voyage across the water
to nestle under the prismatic rainbow of silver beads 
that loops from bough to bough. Joseph is missing, 
but he will be a good father, albeit a doubtful husband. 
It's him that I now wish to take after. I'm tired 
of following the music of stars that always retreat. 
Jesus, wiser men, and devoted disciples can do that. 
1 forgot, there's one more thing under the tree, 
strangely out of place though I placed it there— 
a wolfs mask made out of bull's hide and rabbit fur. 
Before going to sleep, I'll put on that and lie down 
with the rest of the guests, released again at least 
for this night in a gentle circle of friends, carefree 
and joyful at the foot of the pine, at the foot 
of our Lord, under the wings of the snow-white bird.

ALL SAINTS' EVENING 

1

descending Basanavičiaus
saw a dozen jackdaws
against the moon
no dictionary depicts their graphic hearts
the candles in Rasų cemetery
flutter against the dark
as these wings against the light

the dead and the living 
roam the same city together 
the sun is a room at twilight 
with the curtains drawn

2

Rasų cemetery 
Basanavičiaus' grave 
one less candle 
still with me

3

acid rain destroys the lettering 
recompense is to decipher 
the footprints in the mud 
at the unknown plots

mourners resemble gravestones 
sitting on their blankets 
spread like leaves on the grass

BLUE SKY

Blue sky in the Vilnius ghetto, 
the balcony facing the Northern light... 
crows caw outside the window 
as the stars start to stagnate into 
a septic clarity of polluted light. 
Could one grab a beak to 
a feather to row across the... 
a blueprint to match the eyes.

O' may your lips never read the blood 
they've tread on mine,

and so turning to the disquieting book 
so annoying but framing every vision 
on this urban perch in this chosen land— 
poor Pessoa_, one reads as one might read 
the works of a disconsolate waterbug 
confined by timidity to the corner 
of a kitchen spending a lifetime 
telling us how not to live, 
and yet

that distant birdnest in the leafless,
Winter lilac, days so short now,
I should be bathing in sugarcane in Brazil
and not here with so many wingless dreams
battered by a cold, faceless wind,
bread and salt useless tokens,
the song as all songs an illusion
as the ripples disappear into silence.

Not a waterbug nor a transcribed cockroach,
these days I'm just a customs-clerk,
and this frightens me waking up
almost inhuman with the window
strangely open,
and I drink my glass of water,
calculate the level of mercury
and listen to the crying giving life
to my poem as they drag them
on a beautiful blue day like today
down the alleys, into the forests
and into the trains.

INCLUSION

for Džoja Barysaitė 1997-99

Circle yesterday all gray. Sportcoat frayed
from Managua to Prague to Neringa. Senses senile.
The blue mountains submerged in the darkroom.
My photographer's asleep on our sofa. I am reading
a conflated copy of Childe Harold and Don Juan.
Today's heteronym is Tristan, who lies dead-awake
on a side street with the morning star in his gut.
She can tint the lack of joy I put into her hope
on the postcards stashed into a briefcase
with the negatives of a hunger for a bliss
that would outshadow the embryonic demons I harbor.

Now it's simpler to just say the calendulas are a different 
color in a different country, and the still-water 
in Nida almost fresh when I imagined it salty, 
coating the skin of the pillows with brine. 87% of  
the inclusions in amber are spiders. They are all over 
the curtains and the ceiling and the walls, and we 
kill them with our sandals. She is so good—a dolphin, 
an acrobat on a railing of love, a Charlie Chaplin 
without a flower in the silent drag of our discourse. 
The candles are lit. An odalisque comes to life I shiver. 
The entire pink Baltic at sunset her bathtub and home. 
My home nowhere though I might wish it here with her.

It was written by an ecclesiastical instrument
that another would return to create another version...
She or I turning she and I turning she or I...
And we would hold up our photos out of focus
into the distant offing of black and white, or in colors
too noonday intense for any deep shades of meaning to take.

We'll trim one photo, put in the wallet with a whole array 
of  fractured ghosts, and tomorrow it will be your turn 
to suffer her hope, to limp down past he long-legged 
women for whom you casually hunger, to roll over 
in your mind and tan the other cheek, and watch the Mothers
wheel the baby-carriages to the water's edge on the beach. 
It's the wrong bait, of course. And to feel sad, of course, 
that į can't burn better than this. A rebate at best, delivered
to the earth neither post-man nor ur-man, nor human. 
"Put him back"—the first words to pierce the envelope of the ear.

And to know now that each and every half-life of each 
and every second, that she recognizes my blood burns 
no better than ashes beyond even the negative of being, 
that I perform life a mime handed down as hoc est corpus. 
This is my body on deposit, empty, unredeemable. 
This is my blood shed for myself, and no one else. Amen.

HERETICS

/ knew when I saw that
ant
struggling against
the others
under the plastic
green table
at the Golden Dunes,
that it would burn
elsewhere soon
as was its dream
when it crossed
into this
world.
No, I take that back. It's a heretic
content to be a small, dark thing—-
and there are many of them,
heretics. They are not
martyrs to burn resplendent
in a paradise of the imagination.
From under the green table
at the Golden Dunes,
the other ants exit in formation
diagramming the Universe
as dying dots design the destiny
of believers
in the zodiac.

KITSCH POEM

I've fallen asleep
but this is what I remember
of the world—how pen and nightmares
and butterflies move by the bed
as if on automatic pilot,
how daylight played truant,
how the world turns
to a Nocturne by Chopin
flicked by the finger
of a God
looking off into other matters,
absent-minded,
mesmerized by a brighter sun
and trying to imagine
how it was
that Gods first dressed in flesh and blood,
and how routine it all is
except for such momentary sparks
as ascension, falling, the orgasmic dance
of lips and tongue, war, explosions
of far-away stars that sparkle
like Christmas-lights in the dram of a child.
I've set my biological clock
so that when I awake for the Millennium
in Vilnius to a Grieg suite
from Peer Gynt (my detested shadow),
a young woman from Warsaw
will be so deep in my arms
that I'll feel nothing
but ascension and fatting, ecstasy
and war, the explosion of the sun
and the self in an apocalyptic dream.

RIFFS OFF DONALDAS KAJOKAS

her tongue between
unknown teeth    what lungs
on lips can answer
it's dark and darker
on the other side

it seems it seems 
there are asters 
growing in the middle 
of the dark and darker 
on the other side 
of the road her teeth 
gleam    a flower stuck 
there a pipe smoking 
her rosary of sex

with a blue aster
wedged
by the tongue
and there is
so much space there for
a few words to fall
dark and darker
into a blue hole
in the ice
and swim    with other fish
inside the emptiness
inside the other side
of the dark

the bobbin pops out    okay
hang on to Providence
by a thread
the boat overturns the world
the weft turns dark and darker
on the other side
into a web of smoke

outside
fish
shuttle back and forth
in a drizzle
of indigo
dark and darker
cerebral space       hunger
holds desire
snow just a second of snow
on the blue aster
blue into a rose into white
stem into spine into fire
dark and darker        lavalampflower
of snow       petals and lips
incandescent         on the other side
it seems dark
and darker        unknown words drawing
the tongue swimming a fish a fish
inside the inside
of emptiness

35

AFTER HORACE GREGORY'SCATULLUS

Come Poem, tell my friend, dear Daga, 
that librettist who writes 
of love's sweet harm,
       to visit the streets of Vilnius. 
Tell him to leave that damp, Celtic compost behind, 
and come to where the women are burning 
wet with passion, and one in particular
       for him:
and if he clears his mind (that muddy spring), 
lets go his lisp of Latin, a bright girl 
articulate with a finer fire 
will greet him face to face,
      no need for condoms
      nor Catholic dogma 
to broker his position.

This girl would give up the ghost for him, 
blossom anew, just to undergo again 
the sweet fury of his pen—those lines 
in praise of Artemis and Venus together.
      Isn't that so,
     dear girl,
your body one rich liquor, half loco, confusing 
Sapphic satyrs with Cattulus, mistaking 
all of us for your derelict puer aeternus.

13

AFTER HORACE GREGORY'S CATULLUS

Come, dear Juan, a great feast will be set 
for you at my flat tomorrow, or the next day, 
that is, if the Gods are kind and you bring
      a banquet along:
      I mean I have some vodka steeped in amber, 
but you shouldn't forget some good sherry or Rioja, 
maybe smoked lamb with rosemary, 
and a wild and brilliantly hot girl or two, 
your savoir-faire, of course, and sense of humor.

Bring these, my amigo, and you 
will have the dinner of your life; 
your Hermes (look) has nothing but 
cobwebs and broken shells in his pocket. 
But, my brother, look again, you'll 
see something that has no price—
      our friendship,
      richer than pearls or love or passion. 
Wait! take a whiff of this other paper—it's 
the perfumed letter you left here last 
time—from Beatrice—the same I think 
I gave her some month's before,
      a fragrance form Venus.
      My Juan, when you smell this, 
you'll smell the madness of rapture, your nose 
never able to rid itself 
of this delicious bond we share.

* The author resides in Vilnius