Vladas Braziūnas

in my other life as a horse I worked like a horse, during a funeral in the early middle ages in the Prussian contests I was driven exhausted, still alive, into a hole pushed on my knees face down, my front legs bent, pressed up against my breastbone, crack went the first and second vertebrae in my neck, eyes turned to the setting sun, toward overseas fisheaters, rump lifted high in my other life as a horse I sweated in a German mine in Bohemia in rathole darkness, went blind one night, standing under the new moon, they led me to stable, then later slowly at night, as the moon fattened to full, my blinders went wider and wider, they seasoned me in my other life as a horse having brought Mickiewicz from Nowogródek to Wilno I wandered the city’s streets on wooden sandals to die – everyone to that beloved land, to Vilnius now I am an apparition in Belmont it happens too that I’m frightened by thieves and cars in Sereikiškės on my neck dragging a policeman the color of distant woods in my other life as a bird I worked as a nightingale in a town of hills and valleys near the Danube, framed by forests, groves, in fields in Lithuania I wakened the hayreapers in my other life as a bird all just barely dark night long from May to June I went mad, all slavic night long I went to race with evening’s and later with morning’s birds, shutting them all off, the rabid cuckoo of morning still surprised the naked poet Europennies in his pocket, the pocket in the other room love remains, death and recruits you will cuckoo yourself in my other life as a poet I noticed that all French girls, if we travel lay down or fly – put me to sleep, just alongside so we would not have to talk with words or hands, or hot finger pillows or edges of lips, I dream in a closed space