We heard something give, the mud of night broken by the gate, the colony of the blank page and the lash of being wet and hard across my back. The future slips between my fingers and converges in columns of smoke in this black immensity, the land below a sign transfixed and an ambiguous welcome. I was vigilant. I listened for the wrinkling hole to unlock, for the final significance of this moment, the yellow circles on the horizon quiet as the dead echo of old wreaths on lost doors. I touch the outlines of the fence and closing gate, know suddenly that I am sky and earth, the deepest woods and the rising water. It is always such an instant and I've told you all this before. Wait. It is a terrible struggle this time. This could be heaven and the trees and birds may know I'm here.
Jonas Zdanys is a bilingual poet and translator whose poems and translations have appeared in many magazines and journals, among them American Poetry Review, Connecticut Review, Crosscurrents, Field, Poem, Poetry, Sewanee Review, Yale Literary Magazine, and The Yale Review. He is the author of thirty-nine books, thirty-six of them collections of poetry written in English and in Lithuanian and of translations from the Lithuanian, most recently The Thin Light of Winter: New and Selected Poems (2009) and Artistic Cloning: Poems by Agnė Žagrakalytė (2010). He has received a number of prizes and book awards for his own poetry and for his translations of Lithuanian poetry into English and was the subject of an exhibit at the National Library of Lithuania on the occasion of his 60th birthday (http://www.lnb.lt/parodos/2/). He has taught at Yale University and the State University of New York, served for more than a decade as the state of Connecticut’s Chief Academic Officer, and is currently Professor of English at Sacred Heart University, where he teaches creative writing.
