L’État C’est Moi, by Rimas Uzgiris

Cows, by Franz Marc (Germany) 1912

​
L’État C’est Moi
                    after Franz Marc

The bull romps over the palette board
scarring the colours, a golden-hued lord.
You try to brush him off like a fly,
but he snorts, laughs, and then dies.

A river of fire pours onto the floor
causing the sofa to list to one side.
It’s useless now to run for the door,
and there’s nowhere left to hide.

Mountains loom over the horizon’s line:
their cobalt sweats through torrid heat.
Those peaks will have been climbed
by more people than you could cheat

into thinking the world was as you say:
artist, king: every dreamer has his day.

Rimas Uzgiris
​
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.