Two Poems
Rimas Uzgiris
The Way of Appearances
Down at the dock of childhood,
fish rose to feed on a scriptural sky
whose rippling stars illuminated
a boy’s musings on the unity
of cosmos and sole self seen
with feet dangling (like Villon’s vision
of himself: one and done). Mother calls:
where is her first-born son? Alone
and yet a part of a senescent whole…
I took my children there today
to watch the boats embark or come.
Young men winched them onto racks,
and metal groaned while boat fuel fused
the briny air to fishbone combs stuck
in a muddy scalp populated by polyps –
tiny snails as black as coal and numberless,
imbibing the decay. Parmenides thought
all things are one – even here, in this teeming reek
where my first-born son scrapes his knee
on rocks and cries with unrequited grief,
where two blue kingfishers squabble and bicker
for one silver minnow falling through heavenly air…
We walk back up the street, separately, together.
My children will fight over toys, my wife and I
over what? But at night we embrace as one.
Under the Wave
after Hokusai
there is nothing to be done
all hunched and bent
as the airlines now tell you to be:
the bow irrevocably rising
into foam that scatters
like seabirds across the sky
or they could be wisps of cloud
and the sense of freedom
is complete
with Sartre’s nausea
and a mess of fear
you have made your decisions:
you are there for legitimate reasons
the wave could say the same,
natural laws being what they are
Mt. Fuji, like God, keeps its peace
though its spokesmen have filled tomes
to justify its ways
and their meaning breaks over your ears:
be calm
be tough
in the trough of transcendence
you have become the wave
the birds
the clouds
your hands have never been
so full
Rimas Uzgiris is a Lithuanian/American poet and translator. His work has appeared in Barrow Street, Hudson Review, The Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of North of Paradise, and Tarp [Between], (poems translated into Lithuanian, shortlisted for poetry book of the year), translator of eight poetry collections from Lithuanian, and the Venice Biennale Golden Lion-winning operetta Sun and Sea. He was educated at UCSD, UW-Madison, Rutgers-Newark, with a Ph.D. in philosophy and an MFA in creative writing. Recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Grant and an NEA Translation Fellowship, he teaches at Vilnius University.