Kaunas, Lithuania, 1992 Leaving the old town for the new, the passage under the road was the passage into it too. It was what we had to go through in our youth: passing the forlorn flower stall whose blossoms lived only in memory; passing concrete cracked and cracking like a politician’s attempt at apology; passing a crone straight out of Macbeth selling wild mushrooms on the Soviet floor; passing colorless crumpled clothes on a chair with an accordion depressing a soul. The faster you go, the quicker you get to your goal, said the moneymen, forgetting the tortoise and hare. We came out in the new world unchanged except our shadows were now on the other side. The sun, too, seemed more giving here: it burnished the masks of pedestrians along Freedom Boulevard, turning their eyes, once slits of fear, into dimes which they rushed off to pawn, holding their unwarranted hearts like playing cards close to their chests, or like candles, muffled and sputtering with the combustion engines of the road heating the raw world red, but with hope.
Rimas Uzgiris is a poet, translator, and critic. His work has appeared in Barrow Street, Hudson Review, The Poetry Review and other journals. He is the author of North of Paradise, and Tarp, (poems translated into Lithuanian, shortlisted for best poetry book of the year). He is translator of five poetry collections from Lithuanian, and translated the Venice Biennale Golden Lion winning opera Sun and Sea. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Newark University. Recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Grant, a NEA Translation Fellowship, he teaches at Vilnius University.
