Medeinė Tribinevičius 

Translator

^{Remember the day}

^{When I left home to buy some food}

^{Myself in that painful February mood}

^{I did what I could}

              ^{Sibylle Baier}

I saw a video on Facebook made by environmental activists:

a whale swam to the shore and didn't want to leave

people would pull it deeper into the sea—

it would swim out onto the sand

in the end they shot it so it wouldn't suffer

during the autopsy they found 28 plastic bags

that its stomach couldn't digest

people washed and flattened the bags

then filmed them carefully laid out on the ground

to make the digital people shudder

(you could still make out several company logos)

but in actuality I melted with amazement:

to think that in the Atlantic ocean

in an enormous mollusk and seaweed

encrusted whale's stomach travels

a dismal bag from a shopping centre

that I used one day to carry home food or clothes

useless, hard to swallow, meaningless

very slowly and patiently

inviting death

in the Atlantic ocean…

if I could find a way to imagine that bag

it would be almost the same

as understanding infinity

When I met the cyclops

I thought I no longer needed to fear him

I'd seen Redon’s interpretation—

a woman lying amidst foaming pink moss

and a creature as large as a mountain range:

his intoxicating eye

looking at her, or more correctly, looking at the gallery visitors

though foreign and scary

he looked almost innocent—

as though he'd like to make friends, would be childishly curious

I believed it was better to caress fear

rather than run from it

for on the portico of the altar at Delphi

were carved these words:

"Know thyself”

But when I met the cyclopes

he appeared to me as a former flame

voluptuous lips and small chubby hands

that sad smelted-steel gaze that made your skin crawl

he specialized in psychoanalysis

his eye saw clear through me: I couldn't resist him

but I did

for some reason no one mentioned that knowing thyself

was so directly connected with disillusionment

with a strange loving of disappointment

apparently, poetry has to destroy all

self-illusions, all cliches, has to tear apart the thick sticky

cobwebs where He has settled:

a spider overgrown in black bristles limbs sharp as

needles, in whose dark snout you can just barely make out a smile

(what it means is another question entirely)

apparently, poetry...

but nonsense, as we all well know:

the only way to escape alive, to get out of this cave

is flat against the belly of a sheep

^{Found at the edges of forests or in clearings on the flowers of various plants and on tree trunks or hollows. They smell of pitch. (Wikipedia)}

I noticed that I sometimes stop breathing

yesterday (for hours) I was translating a film about eating insects

and I'd sense that I was no longer breathing, I'd slowly take a deep breath

and continue to translate, this repeated over and over

those insects and larvae bewitch me

I understood why they are so disgusting,

they wriggle, there are so many of them, they often feed on manure, rose nectar

all sorts of rotten stuff, but in the pan they begin to wiggle

come alive in the heat, move and whisper

in other words, they're so full of life

we are used to corpses and abstractions: shimmering pink

fillets, colourless blue chicken quarters, heart-red ground meat

having never seen mosses, silvery elk-horned lichens and streams

where creatures skate on stick-thin legs,

in English they're called Jesus bugs,

we are used to eating corpses that will never move

on our plates

why is this any less horrifying

than resurrection, transformation, a miracle

A vertical crystal coffin

housing a two-meter-long horn,

brought out from a church treasury somewhere—

ceremonial proof of the existence of unicorns

though, as a conceited 21st century person,

I knew it was a narwhal tusk

this didn’t lessen its effect:

a ridged, bone grey ocean spear

sharp point

clearly designed for battle

there I met a pious soul straight from the Middle Ages

our sentence was the same: death

to things, molecules, feelings and all the rest

only I was promised more journeys

even before death my colourful knapsack, Keds,

violet velvet skirt, my other things and nothings

will go off to charities (no one will eat leather goods during a famine)

or will slowly change colour in landfills

maybe by some waterway a little scrap of my trash will reach a tropical island

settle blasphemously

in a narwhal's stomach

I guess these banal details

help avoid thinking about the essence—

a thinking shaped by google and facebook

but maybe in that moment I experienced the same

blessed fear, the same aesthetic capitulation

as that soul from the Middle Ages,

when I too laid eyes on this magical horn

capable of cleansing poisoned black rivers

capable of impaling, piercing your cherished

exhausted body—

turning you into meat

it would be fair if afterwards,

someone ate me

How to describe that smell?

Dried brown leaves, gold dust

(sprinkled with drops of green juice)

the surface of the warm pond warm as tee, reeds

rotting sweety (though it should have cooled off long ago)

the first time I felt it was fall 2015:

for several days summer gushed into the city,

air thick the lakes soaked in dust-scented summer

everything giving pleasure:

heat in the gloaming, bathing in the Green Lakes

every inhale. Every step

I asked everyone: what’s that smell? can you feel it?

what does it mean? will it come back?

some twitched their noses as though they didn’t understand

others praised it, but as a usual thing –

like fog, or dew or the like

there were no great Noses around

who catalogued smells in their minds, their memories and compositions

created noxious or healing combinations

I waited, did not forget

this spring it returned, along with the mid-summer heat

the green buds tore open as though ensnared in a Radauskas story

in short, everything bloomed naively – from the plums to the chestnuts…

I melted, swimming in the scent of blooming rust

that cherries could not overpower

but all was unmasked by the thin voices in the new portals:

the air is terribly polluted, hectares and hectares of forest burned

no wind or rain the ash has nowhere to go

such a pesky chorus of mice:

squee squee, squeee squeak!

squeak!

squeak!

I read an african woman poet and shudder

what dreadful poetry, I think

how unpleasant

and how different it is

to be terrified by good poetry

good poetry is full of life’s sweat

and death’s piss

it is an electrical switchboard

where contracting blood vessels

pulse visibly

as though suffering a humiliation

          the tar is already bubbling

          soon they will stick your finger into it,

          philistine,

          yes, yes, you must fear good poetry

          because, you see, people don’t

          just fly to Bali

          and lick ice cream

          they also lick wounds

          children don’t just sniff flowers

          but also sniff glue

          they sleep not only in beds,

          but also between two mounds of earth,

          on one side mama, on the other – papa

good poetry participates in orgies

thrashes around, all worked up,

with various incarnations, with natural phenomenons,

lightning, for example

just imagine poetry and lightning coming together…

of course also with birds, plants,

the whole kingdom of fungi,

ghosts, lizards, mammals

but she is not fond of groomed purebreds

she likes the dishevelled, crooked mixed breeds

all crooked forms are beloved to good poetry

because just try and confine it to any trigonometry

or Ark of the Covenant –

the curse word has not yet been invented

that she will invoke to explode

any walls closing in around her

good poetry gives life to some and death to others

to some she is goddess, to others, the reaper –

a toothed gap of some sort

that you always think you can squeeze through but inevitably leaves you

bloodie

          the tuvans drown in alcohol

          the indians are confined to reservations

          whales swallow plastic and weep in the oceans

          the tropics bleed palm oil

          for orangutans to wade through –

          today’s most melancholy of poets

poetry belongs to literature

and what is literature but a lifetime of DNA

all that cosmic dust,

underground bio archives

and epigenetic tricks

she is not competent, will pull the exemption card in a heartbeat

she is colossal against the law

no one can detain her or sentence her to death

prisons are but castles made of sand,

firing squads—but tin soldiers

she cannot even kill herself

and if she tries immediately falls pregnant

with anything that might try to harm her

people often try to hide from good poetry

from bad – not so much

one is an uninvited boogey-man, covered in liverwort

the other a wounded comforter, appearing only when called

and there is nothing more terrible

than the resuscitation of bad poetry

it makes even the most harmless demons horrible

and thus even the most horrible demons of good poetry

are downright angelic

companions with whom you can rage into the night

and dive into the abyss

spectres burst from this energy

bloom and die continually

and in death

pass on to you

the most fragile of the world’s light

for a long time I looked up at the sky

at the airplane trails thrown across

which appeared like a sign

left on purpose

they were tied together

they made a big “ex”

as though someone had marked

on the blue canvas with a white marker

the place to make an incision

to open an aperture across

so I could discover what lurks on the other side

of the glittering screen

the other side of the flapping canvas

painted with moving canoes of clouds

in which floats an old man

pushing away from the bottom

with beams of sun

I had the thought -- we are like the sky

when we look at one other

with the same eyes we look at the sky

we see the marked places

where we should cut

to find out

what lurks behind

but we cannot resolve to do it

hold the knife

with shaking hands

we are afraid to cut too deep

we are afraid to harm

the animals living

on the other side