FOR TOMAS VENCLOVA
A modest little country by the sea.
It has its snow, an airport, telephones,
its Jews. A tyrant’s brownstone villa.
A statue of a bard is there as well,
who once compared his country to his girlfriend.
The simile displayed, if not good taste,
sound geography: for here the southerners
make Saturday the day to go up north,
from whence, a little drunk, on foot,
they have been known to stray into the West—
a good theme for a sketch. Here distances
are well designed to suit hermaphrodites.
Noonday in springtime. Puddles, banked-up clouds,
stout, countless angels on the gables
of countless churches. Here a man
becomes a victim of a jostling crowd,
or a detail of the homemade baroque.
To be born a century ago
and over the down bedding, airing,
through a window see a garden grow
and Catherine’s crosses, twin domes soaring;
be embarrassed for Mother, hiccup
when the brandished lorgnettes scrutinize
and push a cart with rubbish heaped up
along the ghetto’s yellow alleys,
sigh, tucked in bed from head to toe,
for Polish ladies, for example;
and hang around to face the foe
and fall in Poland somewhere, trampled—
for Faith, Tsar, Homeland, or if not,
then shape Jews’ ringlets into sideburns
and off, on to the New World like a shot,
puking in waves as the engine churns.
Time departs in Vilnius through a café door
accompanied by sounds of clinking forks and spoons,
while Space screws up its eyes from booze the night before
and stares at Time’s slowly retreating spine.
A crimson circle, with its far side off,
now hangs moored in utter stillness over roof tiles
and the Adam’s apple sharpens, quite as if
the whole face had shrunk to its sheer profile.
Obeying commands like Aladdin’s lamp,
a waitress decked out in a cambric halter
saunters about with legs recently clamped
around the neck of a local footballer.
St. George, that old dragon slayer,
spear long lost in allegory’s glare,
has kept in safety up till now
his sword and steed, and every place
in Lithuania pursues, steadfast,
his aim unheeded by the crowd.
Who now has he, sword clenched in hand,
resolved on taking? What he hounds,
a well-placed coat of arms blots out.
Who can it be? Gentile? Saracen?
The whole world, perhaps? If that’s so, then
Vytautas knew well what he was about.
Sleeplessness. Part of a woman. A glass
replete with reptiles all straining to get out.
The day’s long madness has drained across
the cerebellum into the occiput,
forming a pool; one movement and the slush
will feel as if someone, in that icy blot,
has dipped a sharpened quill that, after a pause,
deliberately traces the verb “hate”
in oscillating scribbles to reverse
the brain-wave pattern. Something lipsticked stuffs
the ear with lacerating lengthy words,
like running fingers through a hairdo stiff
with lice. Alone and naked in your sack,
you lie there, fallen from the zodiac.
Only the sea has power to peer en face
at the sky; and a traveler in the dunes
lowers his eyes and sips at his metal flask
like a king in exile, with no psalm-like tunes.
His house ransacked, flocks driven to foreign land.
Son hidden by shepherds inside a cave.
And before him lies just a hem of sand
but his faith’s not enough for a walk on waves.
Turn off the thoroughfare, then into
a half-blind street, and once inside
the church, which at this hour is empty,
sit on a bench, adjust your sight,
and, afterwards, in God’s whorled ear,
closed to the clash of day’s discord,
whisper four syllables, soft and clear:
Forgive me, Lord.
1971
Translated by Alan Myers