Alfonsas Nyka - Niliunas
Poetry
VDA 2012
Alfonsas Nyka - Niliunas
Poetry
Alfonsas Nyka - Niliunas
Poetry
VDA 2012
Autobiography 1986
I was born and grew up in a Country created in my parents’ imaginings. I had my own Home and my own name. Now I live In my own suitcase, having laid out The things most necessary for every day Miniature furniture and book Shelves with my own Discours de la methode, With my own Sein und Zeit, with my own Nearly worn out Masks and without cessation I cart myself on airplanes And trains (Occasionally send myself through the mail), Trying to find a place In being and time. Now I call myself Killalusimeno. 7
All souls day
A cold fall rain into the heavy Granite of the heart. On the edge of blindness The letters of your name in the yellow Flicker of a candle. Faces Threadbare as the weeping old woman’s Umbrella. And black melancholy.
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A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur
Cold sprays of lilac melted, and in the frail drugged evening vaguely somehow disquieted of what? we trembled, as the doors would quarrel in fifths and octaves and then suddenly we heard their voices pulpable as flame: And they call us! And as if we had penetrated sign and enigma of their bodies’ contour, each night, fell into nightlong dreams of archipelagoes and their strange islands, joyous processions, bent, narrow streets. And with hands unawakened, played with the pure sand of the amphitheatre of their configured waists and haunches. Our reveries adorned them with fair hair, russet lashes, profiles of cameos, lethal gowns and hands that shone like soundless crystal. Now we feared only their strange fragrance, motion and form, like those of vessels.
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In the orchard, gathered under trees, we would play, as we listened to plashing water that unclothed us, timid, always regretful, why they didn’t leave us and run away. Then by pure chance our glances come together eye to eye. We would run, startled, and not know why. And afterward for a long time, avoided home. Or there, wandered from room to room, loitered at doors and paused at mirrors we who had learned all the hermetic curves and labyrinthine bodies. Our dread, the smile of walls and windows and of the mother. Strange, her gentle rustling! ...Unable now to silence in ourselves the sure voice of the tree of knowledge.
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Midday
Hands wait forever. On the table remain Blue hyacinths, in the eyes Stains of dusty lips, And the equations Of your joy, written With the cold chalk of memory, On the blackboard of being.
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Meetings and separations
Meetings and separations The rhythm of life and death. The train in the Utena Station and The Via Dolorosa on the mystical Kaunas street Where having stopped by a well Jesus drinks Blood from a rusted cup.
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Party Wer spricht von Siegen? Ueberstehn ist alles.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The dancer’s impact on the drunk is vague, ambiguous: the totem of her body floats in air, almost abstract, and changes their shapes and distances destroys their selfishness to be apart, to be somewhere, to be a world. An arm about the shoulders of a smile enfolds the distant spaces that fill the fall of dusk. A voice in snatches: “Why did you come? Don’t touch my hands! Could I have said all that? Forget it!” And then a cry, prolonged and hopeless. The body of the dancer floats abstract in air.
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One spring day once
Your hair, moaning, melted away In the lantern’s mystical light and the pastorale Of the gray water’s murmuring, in the house Where I, looking at the sun, grew up, Where one night a magical bird descended. But you did not see it. How could I have Shown it to you? How? In the pen The bored horses snorted. My father Climbed heavily up the hill. On other side Of the river a voice called out: “Did you find it?” And another from farther off, like an echo: “No!” That was the end of your long, hard and dull day, For which I search now without stopping, even though a voice On the other side of the river calls out: “No!”
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A ghost encounters someone returning from exile
After long wandering (the gates are already right here) My hands began to be insensitive to the feel of things, And I lay like a dried up tree Near a foreign river, beneath unfamiliar stars. Unfamiliar rain Pitilessly lashed my skin; The sun barely out, I ran, afraid of its vengeance; at night I dreamed about the clanging of weapons, bloody flags and marches, I marched in columns with those condemned to die, Knowing that their reality was only my dream; But they left me, like an actor to applause, And died alone and for themselves, Afraid that I would betray them on the other side. And I awoke like that, unseen by even the guard. Unable to endure the emptiness Most empty of the empty Most naked of the naked Back covered with the remnants of the argonaut’s tunic, I returned home. Near the gate an unfamiliar ghost said: “You knew what crime is;
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You knew the price of freedom, blood and slavery, But did not know what you left behind: take it, all is yours. Nothing has changed here. Your weathervane is crucified. Your tree remained And died without completing its last testament to you. What a clear night! What rustling of water! Your mother was buried in the vault of heaven Because the earth was saturated with her sons’ and your brothers’ Cain’s and Abel’s blood. Your sister Moonlight Became a foreign soldier’s concubine, and her children Patrol the farthest borders of the Scythian’s lands. Your wife is still faithful and is waiting for you Seven sons would not dry her tears, Seven rivers would not wash away her shame And the shirt she has woven to greet you she washes In the blood of the Centaur Nessus. What a night! What rustling of water!”
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Dust
When I found you Friendly familiar motes of dust Were hanging on your red eyelashes. Beyond the table with the cool pitchers of night Daybreak burned and a black summer butterfly was sleeping On your right breast.
March
I still searched for your Neglected silhouette in the dead window. Your lips in the rain and your voice In the loneliness of childhood’s well; your steps’ Dark track in the sand, Where the valley’s blind echo laments At the top of the black alder, near the path, For the moon, robed for death by the wind.
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Picasso: A girl with a fluttering dove and a blind minotaur It was night. Tall fishermen Stood on the eyelashes of silence. The river Sounded the power and longing Of the season of flood. The girl a large dove With fluttering hair Radiant and being Wind and night and tree Led the blind Minotaur by the hand Through the landscape’s naves As if she were carrying a broken branch. And we remained with the fishermen on shore, Wept for her a long time And wrung our hands: Because who is the Girl leading The blind Minotaur into the night? What is The dove, fluttering in her hand? And the line of the Minotaur’s nostrils, Equal expression of ambiguous pain?
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Resignation
Why are you still fighting with me? Forget it and don’t listen. I long ago became Like that bird in the impoverished landscape Who, his mate dead, does not search for Another and sings alone until death To the valley’s alder trees and willows.
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Inferno Leave all despair, who enter here. (Comte de Lautreamont)
To. J.G. Through dark streams of the cerebral complex I penetrate a season tht was not in the world, gray-horizoned, with ardent trees (like ours, their roots more powerful than their trunks), where my friend Hermes, the Aurora Gate in his eyes, sins the sheen of your hair, and sun the scarlet domino of the carnival of our time fixed in green polar ice, listens to him. The bells of the Virgin’s month that toll (under the earth); the Mystical Rose, my Mystical Rose, Queen of Immaculate Time (under the earth), meet us. Wild birds that would each autumn wrench us from dark-haired shadowy places; fatherly errant parabolas of the familiar shadows of the rooms of youth and of the closing wooden doors, parabolas that filled the evenings of the departed, meet us (under the earth). Thus my arrival at a melancholy town.
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A saint, his hand somewhat corroded, stops me, cries: “You know here’s Inferno!” Yes! This journey’s not my first. And in my mind’s eye rises The First Circle: Shannon, the waiter from Perpignan, and the doomed, with ciphers on their faces. But I go forward. I do not turn back. A street of dust under my feet, I see this woman, joyous it may be, my mother. At the rotten parapet of the bridge I find again, as in the mirror in my native home, Yvonne de Galais who waits, her hair mournfully fair; she tells me that The Memory of Mortefontaine, in velvet darkness, sleeps like a pearl that glimmers the full red moon drowned in the veins of a tree. Wrapped close about the house, but dry already lies the river. Only the lake has grown still more, both from sorrow and rain. With keener glance, one glimpses in the water the outline of a church, like a drowned man, snail- and weed-bedecked. I put my ear to the earth. I listen. Clad in their small white shirts, the choir of moles continue with their singing: In your world only the ironic forms of recollections live Eumenides, the world has died, your God exists no more.
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Beside the yellow churchyard gate, in a Soutine-red jacket, stands a young drummer. Girls, their breasts quite hidden, their bodies formless, and as if they had been mothers long before, lead forth a faceless bride, in whose still childlike flesh wee see a numerous family and a wooden table. This is the Last Supper. The last bread and water. A dry Garden of Gethsemane rustles beyond the pane. In small white shirts, alas, the moles’ choir sings the hitherto joyless Epithalamium. Faces. Bells. Faces. Bells. And a beggar bird, his cap on his knees.
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He would stand up as we approach, but leaves, wind-driven, close our eyes, and he vanishes without a word. In her body we find the silhouette of a ruined house. Diligent as a little shepherd, a gray worm, that has constructed something with great care in the antechamber, starts. He opens the door and, his face covered with tears, leads me into the room. There in the middle of the floor lies in pieces in a broken mirror my face. Behind the table sit the brothers. But they no longer know me. Across the floor scurries the mouse from Gorki’s book, the one that we would once have raised into a horse to ride into more light. That, God did not allow. Thus we remained, our hope of liberation smothered in wretchedness to us senseless, to others, sanctified. Mother sits by the wall and thinks, perhaps, how every spring my father dreamed of sailing-ships and winds. Then suddenly she lifts her eyes, and says, “You didn’t bring us God?” No. I could not find Him anywhere.
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Still, my wish is to console them (you will rise again); but the worm outside the door resumes the song, and I, who understand that the joy of oblivion has been, for them, still greater than their hope for eternal being, I burn for a long time with a bizarre illusion, that, dead, I shall call up my sleeping angels from the sand, and in time’s distant reaches overtake the angel of Bellini who bears on his enormous wings their bodies up to God, and thus after a hard struggle, bring lost paradise to them heavens that open simply to the key of iron, and the footprint’s echo upon the earth.
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Alfonsas Nyka - Niliunas
Poetry
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