LITUANUS LITHUANIAN QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES   Volume 48, No.2 - Summer 2002 Editors of this issue: Violeta Kelertas ISSN 0024-5089 Copyright © 2002 LITUANUS Foundation, Inc.

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AN OBJECTIVE LOG
for Sigitas Parulskis

KERRY KEYS

Zapata, the Minister—dead,
attacked by students with quills and books—the herd hates
the tired wisdom of philosopher-poets.
Liudvikas—dead, they called him Bull
because his path left roses and blood in his tracks.
Laurynas Katkus—dead, he lived for the right word, wore
white-framed glasses and once drank tea with too much mold.
Blind Bložė—dead, Radha couldn 't get enough, he hanged himself
by his rosary.
Nijolė—dead, committed suttee on her lover's pyre.
Eugenijus—dead, trampled by a nightmare.
Neringa—dead, belly-up in the tide after leaping the cliff at Leucas
with swallows attached to her limbs.
Sigitas Geda—dead, he like angels and flowers before they cremated him,
an owl landed on a branch to hoot.
Sigitas Parulskis, himself—dead, when he discovered the door
it was locked.
My Mexican hermano—dead, an anonymous woman took him
for her anonymous husband.
Of course, there are the living whom I've never known,
never seen, seeds of my imagination,
and there are crosses and there is rain—dead,
poems, confessions, agape—dead,
and forgiveness for the Soul—dead,
everything touched—dead, even nothing
refuses to remain.

COHERENCE
for N.E. Enkvist

Which bought a river.
Martha didn 't paddle across the Delaware in a gray boat.
We watched a waterbug ride a leaf over the moon's reflection.
Over Warsaw the sky is often gray with pathos.
Communism and Capitalism are white and black.
Black cats mediate between different worlds. White cats are green.
On the globe under the equator, conscripts read the Southern Hemisphere left to right.
Human rights were discussed in the seminar at the
Veterinarian school.
Volunteers tortured themselves with gonorrhea in Vietnam because they didn't wear raincoats.
The Mekong River irrigates corpses.
I remember the convention in Philadelphia.
It's raining.
Who or what is it?
Why do capillaries whitewash the small print on the manifest destinies of bottled notions?
If it's political karma then aren't you Maya, and who stole the conven from the icebox.
To sell the river and buy a Mercedes for my mother.
She sings the hottest salsa.
Ketchup is too sweet in the Jewish ghetto so we use tomato paste for Halloween.
The Nationalists complain about the contamination of the culture.
Tombstones are used as steps to the wedding-house.
The veil is nylon and inside-out.
Before and after the mummy with the gold filling.
I shaved my head and pretended I was a Mohican.
If you can walk on hot coals through this understory without making any noise, then you will disappear in the same way.
It's not raining.