gray photography of ashes
\nfrom which a woman smiles vilnius century’s end
\na man as if alone plenty of room in corners
\nthat turn yellow from the sun of vesuvius
\nof fingers they return to the same place
\nbecause it is an emptiness according to celan
\naccording to einstein it inflates and splits<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
from the lives of the saints<\/strong><\/p>\n I’ve tuned my vocal chords <\/p>\n marlborough hotel<\/strong><\/p>\n as forecast the wind is rising <\/p>\n golden season<\/strong><\/p>\n wearing army boots you clumped through the vineyards of god <\/p>\n on the question of ecology<\/strong><\/p>\n my ecological balance has been disturbed <\/p>\n By Eugenijus Ali\u00c5\u00a1anka<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[484,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-maintenant","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nnow even a cough is in a major key
\nnow everything I think about
\nharmonizes with life
\nlogical inferences feces
\ndecalogues troikas of stalin quadrats of rock ‘n’ roll
\npoets prostitutes
\nthe last woman saint in europe died
\nwithout writing a book
\nthe first one died
\nwithout knowing a man
\nso that sinners like me
\ncan cough politely covering mouth with palm
\nor with a knife along the whole gamut
\nalong the whole life
\neverything I think about harmonizes with the poem<\/p>\n
\nlitter resurrects its promised land
\nacross a span from the center of the empire
\nbeyond the sea the balts carouse
\nspices on a woman’s body
\nshe is no one’s so everyone’s eyes indulge
\nmany aim out one span
\nfrom the center they think about day and night
\neven words have lost accuracy
\njudges are more concerned about poetry
\npoets about the anatomy of death
\neven the messenger forgets to sober up
\nin the capital for shame I forgot
\nwhich god had to accompany me
\na passerby asks where are you from
\nand suddenly the wind rises
\na scrap of newspaper leaps from the pavement
\nhits my face satori or the chain of devolution
\nwhat’s the difference soho chinatown
\neverywhere I am one span away
\nfrom a woman’s shoulder from
\na black taxi speeding by on the right
\na left-hander knows this all his life
\nand the wind changes direction
\nat every crossroad but always blows in my face
\nI barely open my mouth to ask the way
\nmy tongue is buried in sand in dead
\ndunes in oases of mirages after forty
\nyears having left the fringes of the empire
\nhere before the mirror
\nin the hotel I cannot afford to finish
\nwhat I have started<\/p>\n
\nsomewhere on the adriatic in medana or pri\u00c5\u00a1tina maybe piran
\nsince school days geography has been your blind spot
\nyour worn overcoat faded by weather shows its original color
\nwhere your insignias were roman fatigue
\nor just the tedium at the fringes of the empire
\npatches stained with dirt and blood in the nights there was time enough
\nto think about possibilities of life about other lives here
\nabout a woman about many women
\nimprisoned in attics of your dreams while the south wind
\nevery morning blows in wreckage of jason’s ships
\nsweat of impassioned men the mirage of the most beautiful woman
\nevery drowned man would tell the truth about how many women he’d had
\nbut the living don’t dare make a mistake
\nthey make mistakes and let themselves be chained to oars
\nto the mast women singing in the vineyards
\nwhich century from
\nhistory is your blind spot
\nonly the erection you hide behind a shield
\nbetrays your nomadic soul your merciless
\nhunger for blood even now at the end of the century
\nagainst a background of faded architecture
\nwhere clotheslines barely hold flapping laundry
\nyou are not indifferent to death maybe just a cheap wine
\njust a ticket from a travel agency in the pocket of your jeans
\nfixing your eyes on the thighs of the girl selling grapes
\nyou smell the delicious scents of helen<\/p>\n
\nthe climate is warming days grow tepid
\nand nights cool but it’s enough
\nthe glaciers on the peaks of hegel kant lenin are melting
\nyou can’t see it with the naked eye when you set out for mountains
\nsnow-covered peaks rocks look like rocks
\neverything in its place riots ergo rots
\nat the lower reaches landmarks appear
\nmore and more often the river floods chokes the surges of memory
\ndrowns fields leaving neither path nor meadow
\nI wade to my knees cherry branches from goji\u00c5\u00a1kis
\na soda fountain apples from the dalvevka’s orchard
\nmedicinals from the altaj the first condom
\nempty beer bottles float by
\nwithout any joy of cognition
\nthey scud by no regret
\nmore often I feel the greenhouse effect
\ndon’t want to go out
\nendangered clades are disappearing
\nspecies hidden within daily life are dying
\nwords tremblings kisses letters
\nthere where virgin forests had stood
\nfull of meanings and mysteries
\ndeserts of shifting sands of imagination appear
\na bony conformation opens slowly
\nand a low scrub of passions
\ngrows over my dreams my balance has been disturbed
\none leg is kicking the air
\nthe other feeling for the ground<\/p>\n![\"alisankae\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/alisankae.jpg\")
\nABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong>
\nEugenijus Ali\u00c5\u00a1anka<\/strong> was born in 1960 in exile in the Siberian town of Barnaul. His family was granted permission to return to Lithuania in 1962. Alisanka graduated from Vilnius University in 1983 with a degree in Mathematics. Ali\u00c5\u00a1anka established his literary career with the publication of his first collection of poetry, Equinox<\/em>, which won the Zigmas G\u00c4\u2014l\u00c4\u2014 award for the best debut of 1992. His second book, City of Ash <\/em>(1995), was published in English translation in 2000 by Northwestern University Press. The present volume translates his fourth collection, originally published in 2002. His essay collections are An Imagining Man <\/em>(1998) and Return of Dionysus <\/em>(2001). He has also translated from Polish and English into Lithuanian, including work by Wislawa Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, Dannie Abse, Carolyn Forch \u00e9, and many others. His poetry has been translated into English, Russian, Swedish, Bulgarian, French, Finnish, Hebrew, German, and other languages. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"alisanka2\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/alisanka2-150x150.jpg\")
wearing army boots you clumped through the vineyards of god
\nsomewhere on the adriatic in medana or pri\u00c5\u00a1tina maybe piran
\nsince school days geography has been your blind spot
\nyour worn overcoat faded by weather shows its original color
\nwhere your insignias were roman fatigue
\nor just the tedium at the fringes of the empire
\npatches stained with dirt and blood in the nights there was time enough
\nto think about possibilities of life about other lives here
\nabout a woman about many women
\nimprisoned in attics of your dreams while the south wind
\nevery morning blows in wreckage of jason’s ships…<\/p>\n