Vladas Braziūnas

a bright night, warm and gentle as the insides of your thighs, you will sleep through that morning, wake in the day, wait half the sleepy night with me, outside the window snows will blow as they blew, in gusts, outside the window cold hands of cold touch the apple trees' white skin, the half-empty garden stretches across the expansive noticeable expanse, dry the white scrubbed linen sheets of dead mothers, heavy and slow, their flowered dresses, rarely dreamed of, rustle dearest, my dearest, you give me a gift of me, feeble and dirt free

Jesus was sad when he made the flood pitied the people he punished (Lithuanian song) we did not expect to approach shore nor the island and were nailed by illusion and despair to the mast all by twos, all obliged to propagate and multiply, as ordered and sanctified without end and without measure not confused, without love, for without love’s triangle, without a third, without bloody struggle, without love’s dance there was no excess, therefore there was no debauchery we call culture later they released a crow, found shore stepped out pregnant, and then gave birth

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

half the sky is covered with snow clouds, the other drips with rainbows water returns to wells after the droughts snow-dusted cows bellow in the fields and the longest line on the far horizon breaks banging against the blue forest your blossoming skin, the green linden’s white wood bursts into flame under throbbing fingers, on the border sparrows fight with the souls of hop blossoms wind shuffles outside the door, plucks at mosses, grasps at wet timbers and I don’t know if I should cry or laugh, because I don’t understand premature snow nor why it melts so traitorously when I holding on to immutable time, so I would not drive to tears what I drank in with milk, what I believe, the petal from your once-upon-a-time letter walks there and back, unclear, unequal to what was given, how what was created there, when the stove hisses and goes out and last year’s cranes or geese scurry in flocks toward the rainbows, do not consider flying away, on Aisetas the thin ice-coat crackles, only a half day like this or half a life remaining

for Algimantas Aleksandravičius the final beginning: apparitions – the waters glide the frightened mood, hasps closed hard, the palm into a cupped hand, a convulsive fist, fist of women, go out, look, the stains of lightheat try to converse with the meditating, it seems, all finding themselves before the lenses, hiding behind a mask, float to the zone of obscurity, the author waits for rain, perhaps it will wash clean, float on its streams the washed the naked, the uncomforted, the untranslatable into language familiar to us, all that matters is the light coming from the final darkness, only the eye only half an eye illuminating half a glance sinks into an infant’s body, wrinkles, wrinkled clouds filled with rain, undrained, the relationship subjective causal connections but invisible, ocular pressure rises the flood rises, the ebbtide explodes, carries us away

hump-backed rammed roads overgrew with wormwood and poplars, a flock of bullfinches plucked my favourite sleepless rowan who crooked its branches that way, who bent the trunk so strangely, the bark peeled off, I awoke in a full blossom of clouds, amazed, everything is not here, not high, not in the bullfinch’s fly, I am eternally grateful to her, whom I saw after I died.

everything will be infallible as a dream however erroneous, the teeth continue to rot and fall out, they keep saying, you will lose your parents who left for God long ago – it is not about the one, wrapped in a blue bathrobe who steps out of a blue basin into a green playing ground – it is blue and green all over the place but about the one in the Highlands, among yokes and oxen, who likes sweets, and in the Lowlands, who with woodmen looks round, maybe sensing the sea Highlands=Aukštaitija, Lowlands=Žemaitija; the two principal ethnic regions in Lithuania.

1. the guardian angel, roughly made by a convict, from my bookshelf (as if from the Bernardinai pulpit he would listen, how Somebody in his hollow breast creates unlimited space and fulfillment) is silent, the one he failed to guard is again, again behind bars, the hunchbacked recidivist serpent does not care a fig any more 2. we, too, shall be poured into the falling-in well, we shall talk with Bernotas below ground, with grit, with mould, a labourer will water the swinging sweep from the socket of the perished Bėris, sinkholes will widen from surprise, white with Christmas snow – the brimful crib, the bifurcate crowns of trees will bloom, two candles, the blinking of snow goldfinches will sting and ache till Latvia Bernardinai – a church of St. Bernardin in Vilnius. Bernotas – maybe the Lithuanian poet Albinas Bernotas (b.1934). Bėris – a popular name for a horse.

starlings and little birds of hollow in my starling-houses are my most powerful patrons, my playful companions, and first of all my soul’s equilibrating candles with waxen wicks of beaks, dotted diminutive peacocks with pearl crowns and golden rings on their little legs – one will catch and pick them up not really take them off, not really only so it is said in a song, that was dreamed about, that all from nothing – actually was