Vladas Braziūnas

I find it strange that this time I’m not driving and that someone drives me, that the landscapes change, for the time being familiar, the skies burst into bloom that prophecies remain far away, that it’s allowed to stray into remnants, clearly greater than the whole, to come or no longer coming, a bus rolls by short of breath, slow, toward your childhood brownish-green and blotted unscrutinized places, you’ll doze off, cut across the river the swamps lull to sleep, and swings swing and throw the young upwards, to see the highest mountain and the green woods, the bristled tails of fir trees stand stiff, and oak-grove of browned copper, it rained, it flashes, it drips it’s linden not hard rock hewn by your father’s hands hard blistered, it’s not the mortifications that remain but the calluses on your palms, betraying your origin in black earth, the clay, the blue potter’s clay not blood, wagtails in the hutch under the bridge stack up their old lives, and the new one only so much as there is hope remaining to hatch a young Maybird it didn’t turn toward town, the birch grove flew past with brooms of mistletoe, but perhaps it wasn’t that, perhaps it wasn’t my hunchbacked cottage, wet sheep grazing like a November leaf frozen and unredeemable life shivers by, a fishing line from below from the black depths tugged by a pale- lipped sticky mouth, it’s already Apaščia, from the fog from an unfamiliar customs’ station scrambles a would-be apostle, unconverted, leafs through papers worthy unworthy, doesn’t raise the gate, doesn’t assign a penance of prayers, and so, won’t make my beard Margeris, Peteris, Janis and Juris, I’ll fly a bit along my brimming sea, until they press down the small cross and near my name God’s red marker

a wind from God, golden, fragrant above the waters grizzling waves, dark gray clouds, through the crack the modest Capuchin’s bald pate, an ice lens refracts shafts of light and bends them to a pinpoint – protoplasmic flames blaze, flutter up to here life in leaps and bounds, the worm flapped and flew off the word slipped and rose on the third day the word was not with God, it struggled in the corrida with the bull, having stolen Europa from Lithuania the author spider legless crusader, don’t call him it will still proclaim, cooled on the balcony, will fly in on the naked broom of projectors the messenger from information’s inferno the unbaptized woodpecker’s variegation silver from time dead in the clock near the amber sea

for Norbertas Vėlius three little cocks begin to sing into the sunrise man’s face a blossom in Dzūkija opens up and sets on the Nemunas’ race in the midst of Aukštaitija’s fields a table stands – linen and bread a scarf of windowed meadows girdles a figure’s abundant spread underwater paths of silty lakes on which the sunset man will ease a blossom floats in and lights up once more a star on the Aestian seas

we can already call autumn raising a sheaf above our heads autumn, from bells and from the field it will come home wreathed with flower wreaths, will sit at the table where we, grown sweet with exhaustion, will look at our heavy hands and the branchy evening will encircle us (in its shade I once listened to how it calls us, but not by name) the table will be covered with flowers and herbs and it will be indivisible, and our hours and days will be one and we will watch, grown sweet, how the bread knife unifies the bread