LAS has left the building
Your moments were mountains,
words of tangoes, fields of eyes,
crows assembling offerings of
plastic jewels for the poet has
left
building and entered a sliver
of a sun ray, the windows in
homage
silently observe the wind. He
yawps
a white hole signaling out that
we are not art but a
cacophony
of bees, of only some gold bodies
and conglomerate souls, branches
of
a great bending oak: the poet has
left
his body in his poems which
bear witness, a peregrine of
limes
opening the window to show us the
lava is still inching closer for
us all
still Morphos and mirrors
blasting
back teletype shards of
oranges.
We love you as a poinsettia
and
long afternoons in the grasses
of Amsterdam parks, Chicago
moons,
Ohio mounds and forests. The
swept
cave of your voice reverberates,
you, a beacon, a warm
streetlight
guiding us home.
How to live alone with you
Invisible yet our surfaces are
sure,
they are convex and flux
and again I document
all refractions, you through
the prism upon the grey walls
of Toronto today, you seem
particularly as a Nordic hero
indestructible and clever
as I read about a giant who
created poetry, you, a title
card before the film, now
you’ll see the show in colour.
Saving you
From another breakpoint,
the other side of our avian
language, among pine
branches, ice-sheathed,
in your words, I wrap each
line around me, keeping them
in a place to retrieve later as
twigs for a shelter upon the
apartment sill, pugilist
Chicago doves.
To my memory, I wrap my arms
around you, race to you, trace your
body on the floor again and again,
saltwater upon your forehead. Bent
then supine, but to save you,
my failure, my wish to grasp your
most exquisite words from every
pore
of each page, a tree that gave
its
life for it sighed with me, pure lament,
a poet has fused with all its roots
to drink eternal suns.
In Japan, Chrysanthemum
can mean death or sorrow
but here, in our realm, I
see only pale butter face
petals, multi-tiered, a soft
kaleidoscope of how human
you were all along, your being
so unafraid, a radiating weld
spark,
and the any-and-all still-frame
of you, a stunning mane needing
to absorb everything, and you
nabbed my self wholly, we were
us,
standing in the doorway, a place
we
could creature and burrow into
one another, across a threshold or
two, or three, and again, us,
these wax peas and a Stetson in
the Northbound lane, it’s you writing
this horse in the city I
imagined.
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas is a Canadian-American-Lithuanian formerly from Chicago, living in Toronto. She is an award-winning, published poet & video poet. She was a 2020 recipient of a PEN America grant for her development of an experimental poetry collection that adapted poems from Vsevolod Nekrasov and Bill Knott. She was also the voice of George Maciunas’ mother in the documentary, GEORGE (directed by Jeffrey Perkins) screened at MoMA and in Vilnius. Her work has been most recently featured in/at: Film Video Poetry Society (Los Angeles); Octopus Film Festival (Gdansk, Poland); John Gagné Contemporary Gallery (Toronto): Post-Future Era with Kunel Gaur, Justin Neely, and Confusions (Ben Turner); Poetic Phonotheque (Denmark); MOCA Toronto (public installation); SIFF (Moldova); Newlyn Film Festival (UK); Festival Fotogenia (Mexico); Midwest Poetry Fest (US); Vienna Video Poetry Festival (Austria); and the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival (Canada). Her chapbook The Deaf Forest of Cosmic Scaffolding (above/ground press) launches in August. Her website is linaramona.com.
