“Quarantine” by Rimas Uzgiris
By day we count like clocks the dust motes
And wait for the hour of maximum sun
When the forest folds us in
Like the first morning, Eve yet to meet a snake.
The passage back is through the cemetery
Haunted by the occasional human
Shuffling from grave to grave,
Pottering with plants and sloughed pine.
We park ourselves before electric iridescence
Trying to feel our way towards a future:
Seeing only fear and desire and no Eightfold Path,
Seeing only ourselves.
Someone laughs: the innocent madness of the pram.
No one weeps, not yet, so early
In the days counted like motes
Stuck in our eyes. We wash them out.
We wash and we wash
And we wash our sins out.
But we still can’t see the life we imagined we led.
It’s nothing. The spider weaves her web.
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Rimas Uzgiris is a poet, translator, and critic. His work has appeared in Barrow Street, AGNI, Iowa Review, Hudson Review, The Poetry Review (UK) and other journals. He is the author of North of Paradise, published by Kelsay Books (2019). Tarp, his poetry in Lithuanian translation also appeared in 2019. He is translator of Caravan Lullabies by Ilzė Butkutė (A Midsummer Night’s Press), Then What by Gintaras Grajauskas (Bloodaxe), Now I Understand by Marius Burokas (Parthian), The Moon is a Pill by Aušra Kaziliūnaitė (Parthian), and Vagabond Sun by Judita Vaičiūnaitė (Shearsman). Uzgiris has contributed significantly as editor and translator to two anthologies: How the Earth Carries Us: New Lithuanian Poets (Lithuanian Culture Institute), and New Baltic Poets (Parthian). He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers-Newark University. Recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, and the Poetry Spring 2016 Award for translations of Lithuanian poetry into other languages, he teaches translation at Vilnius University.
