Site features poetry, short bio, photos, links to other Zolynas webpages, and access to the Electronic Poetry Anthology of Los Angeles poet Billie Dee.
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Billie Dee's
Electronic Poetry
Anthology
Algirdas Zolynas (b. 1945)
Born in Lithuania, raised in Sidney and Chicago, former dishwasher, lifeguard, factory hand, construction worker, poetry editor, Al Zolynas teaches at U.S. International Univ. in San Diego. His poetry is both smart and nostalgic, expertly balancing Zen-inspired thoughfulness and European-flavored sensibilities. He is the master of refined observation.
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Considering the Accordian
The idea of it is distasteful at best. Awkward box of wind, diminutive piano on one side, raised braille buttons on the other. The bellows, like some parody of breathing, like some medical apparatus from a Victorian sick-ward. A grotesque poem in three dimensions, a roccoco thing-am-a-bob. I once stapped an accordian on my chest and right away I had to lean back on my heels, my chin in the air, my back arched like a bullfighter or flamenco dancer. I became an unheard-of contradiction: a gypsy in graduate school. Ah, but for all that, we find evidence of the soul in the most unlikely places. Once in a Czech restaurant in Long Beach, an ancient accordionist came to our table and played the old favorites: "Lady of Spain," "The Sabre Dance," "Dark Eyes," and through all the cliches his spirit sang clearly. It seemed like the accordion floated in air, and he swayed weightlessly behind it, eyes closed, back in Prague or some lost village of his childhood. For a moment we all floated -- the whole restaurant: the patrons, the knives nad forks, the wine, the sacrificed fish on plates. Everything was pure and eternal, fragiley suspended like a stained-glass window in the one remaining wall of a bombed-out church.
-- Under Ideal Conditions, Laterthannever Press, 1994
The Zen of Housework
I look over my own shoulder
down my arms
to where they disappear under water
into hands inside pink rubber gloves
moiling among dinner dishes.
My hands lift a wine glass,
holding it by the stem and under the bowl.
It breaks the surface
like a chalice
rising from a medieval lake.
Full of the grey wine
of domesticity, the glass floats
to the level of my eyes.
Behind it, through the window
above the sink, the sun, among
a ceremony of sparrows and bare branches,
is setting in Western America.
I can see thousands of droplets
of steam -- each a tiny spectrum -- rising
from my goblet of grey wine.
They sway, changing directions
constantly -- like a school of playful fish,
or like the sheer curtain
on the window to another world.
Ah, grey sacrament of the mundane!
-- The New Physics, Wesleyan University Press, 1972
Living with Others
for Arlie
Yesterday, I discovered my wife
often climbs our stairs on all fours.
In my lonely beastlineess,
I thought I was alone,
the only four-legged climber, the forger
of paths through thickets to Kilimanjaro's summit.
In celebration then, side by side,
we went up the stairs on all our fours,
and after a few steps
our self-consciousness slid from us
and I growled low in the throat
and bit with blunt teeth my mate's shoulder and
she laughed low
in her throat,
and rubbed her haunches on mine.
At the top of the stairs
we rose on our human feet
and it was fine and fitting somehow,
it was Adam and Eve rising
out of themselves before the Fall --
or after, it was survivors on a raft
mad-eyed with joy
rising to the hum of a distant rescue.
I live for such moments.
-- Men of Our Time (Moramarco and Zolynas, eds.), Univ of Georgia Press, 1992
Sailing
After years by the ocean
a man finds he learns to sail
in the middle of the country,
on the surface of a small lake with a woman's name
in a small boat with one sail.
All summer he skims back and forth
across the open, blue eye of the midwest.
The wind comes in from the northeast
most days and the man learns
how to seem to go against it, learns
of the natural always crouched
in the shadow of the unnatural.
Sometimes the wind stops
and the man is becalmed --
just like the old traders who sat for days
in the doldrums on the thin skin of the ocean
nursing their scurvys
and grumbling over short grog rations.
And the man learns a certain language:
he watches the luff beats windward, comes
hard-about, finally gets
port and starboard straight.
All summer, between the soft, silt bottom
and the blue sheath of the sky, he glides
back and forth across the modest lake
with the woman's name.
And at night
he dreams of infinite flat surfaces,
of flying at incredible speed,
one hand on the tiller, one on the mainsheet, leaning
far out over the sparkling surface, the sail
a transparent membrane, the wind
with its silent howl, a force
moving him from his own heart.
-- Men of Our Time (Moramarco and Zolynas, eds.), Univ of Georgia Press, 1992
Other Links
CAPA: Under Ideal Conditions
CAPA: The New Physics
Kshanti Literary Review :Poems by Al Zolynas
Lietuvos Poezua: oems of Algirdas Zolynas
Al Zolynas' Basic Web Page
Books by Zolynas
The Same Air, Intercultural Studies Forum, Inc, 1997
Men of Our Time (Fred Moramarco and l Zolynas, eds.), Univ of Georgia Press, 1992
The New Physics Poems, Wesleyan Poetry Program, Vol. 97, 1972 -- out of print but archived online at CAPA
Under Ideal Conditions, Laterthannever Press, 1994 -- out of print but archived online at CAPA