VARIO BURNOS

Laurynas Katkus

Poems

Introduction

Compression, the American poet Marianne Moore once wrote, is the first grace of style. The poems in October Holidays, by Laurynas Katkus, certainly adhere to this simple dictum. Indeed, they are blessed with a formal integrity, an enviable feel for the poetic line which alone breeds pure music and image. But the poems in this edition, skillfully translated into English, are more than just tight, well-crafted, discreet poetic moments. Far from being a formally repressive and motionless infrastructure, each poem is the contained cell of a larger project, which manages to give shape and voice to a radically shifting period of Lithuanian history. This period is of course the transition from the Soviet rule of the poet’s youth to the difficult realities of present day life in the cities and villages of Lithuania, all of it haunted by the years of fascist rule during the war and the mythic ghosts of Lithuania’s imperial past. Through moments at times liberating, at times fraught with a tension and a troubled lyric which is the birth-right of the modern condition, these poems somehow manage to overspill their compression and engage in a streaming dialogue with one another that’s as difficult and harsh as it is flowing. This is a dialogue of transformation as much as a dialogue of reality, all of it rendered through a subtle, surrealist’s eye. The poet who ponders inflation on the couch one moment, is “crucified on an accordion” a few poems later. The inner-lining, the osmotic exchange that connects these poems, is entirely composed of real, human voices which are eerily conversational, and, as it always is in good poetry, negotiating their way through an objectivist, material reality in which the images glow with our relationship to them. Blocks of centralized bread being delivered by Soviet vans may smell of gas and ferment in the speaker’s memory, they may have consumed the disturbing “us” of the poem, but those are half-gods which wait to rise from the black bread. One-horned oxen may be a simple, natural oddity, but those are humans being lead forward, holding on to the horns of those beasts. “How I envy the deep sleepers”, a voice exclaims in “Fragments”, but this poetic voice is much too aware to be asleep, trembling far too painfully with the lyric clarity that has dreamed it into quivering being, for it to be merely a passing fancy. If the poems in October Holidays are anything to judge by, this poet will be envied among the new generation of Lithuanian poets for many years to come.

Sam Witt. 2001

October Holidays

The piano is silent, drop-leaf covering the keys.

Somebody closed the textbooks with their questions.

Mother, finding me in my hide-out under the porch,

Doesn’t scold, and when asked, makes a cup of cocoa.

Rectangular windows twinkle with colorful lamps.

To stare at them, and stare, and forget

The defeat of the Dakotas of the Great Plains,

And the neighbor dead-drunk in his drinking-glass prison.

One window light melts slowly into the air,

Like a sweet bonbon disappearing in the mouth.

Almost like sitting and waiting for the war to begin

On the screen in the movie house.

Attached so much to what is cramped, what smells,

What weighs one down, and conceals,

Only when compelled, did you learn how

To defend, to side-step, to fall on the ground.

In your hide-out behind the hedged-in barricade

You watch the neighbor’s chandelier burst into darkness,

And mutter over and over with lips nearly numb:

For sure, for sure, I won’t be a guardsman.

Then from the porch the voice of mother: time to come home!

Tomorrow to awaken to the rumble of tanks and brass bands.

So it goes, such are the holidays, in our ageing,

October-born State.

***

steering wheel spreading land dusk
lake stain crossroad flash silent film rolling

roadside towns in a row
where you’ll never spend the night

who is it eyes in the mist foot in the peat-bog
shining pulsing every two miles

who is it you won’t leave you won’t betray
when the lorry horn honks three times

not a cock crowing not a voice not an omen
a can of milk tipped upside down at the bus stop

a drug-like deluge gone to steam in a valley
where we’ll be sailing soon hold on tight

***

Nights and my hair grows longer,
poplars grow downy,
and more and more posters spread across the fence:
memory itself has molted a new skin.

When oh when did I throw out
the recording of your voice, the sketch of your movements,
when did I close the almond eyes
which, on occasion, reflected the plaza.

ŽvĖrynas In Winter

Darkness strikes suddenly

like lightning strikes the chosen ones,

and whispers: don’t fight; give up; calm down...

Shadows sneak into the house across the street,

melting into the bluish blaze of the TV screens.

A blind cyclone tosses between

the roof and the dream.

The sun’s fingers reach out stronger and stronger,

draw open the curtains, and the newborn

fleecy snow astonishes my eyes.

This sparkle, tearing the body apart,

speechless, and me… for a moment.

(Laurynas Katkus. October holidays and other poems. Vario burnos. Klaipėda, 2001)