Untitled #17

a few old photographs from among those
we would look at on Sundays
together with my grandmother, taking one at a time
from the wooden box: this is my brother Praniukas,
my sister Agotėlė, there, the collective,
the threshing-machine, neighbors
the school, at the other end of the cottage (girls
with short hair, bangs to their eyebrows, boys
with shaved heads, the teacher with hair in a crown
of braids), here they scatter
flowers, there are my relatives, at some service
(most likely the feast of St. Stanislaus),
your grandfather, with a giant mustache, when we lived
in the Malijonušės' house, here's you, still small, and
me, in Marijampolė, here's the bridge across the Šešupė,
there's the servant girl, a cat in her arms, your father
(I wonder if he's still alive), a funeral, me
with a flock of geese, and here we are, with both girls
(so serious, in white holiday dresses, that's my mother
and my aunt Zosele), and here we are, look, when we came
home
old-fashioned, funny clothes, copied gestures
in our faces concentration and patience
the dialect, easily recognizable, sung intonations, odd words
already so familiar that we are sorry
when they fade away
work, more important than anything else
and in the evening the fragrance of the garden
beneath the window
to gather all this, put it
safely, like a photograph, into a black box