Rimas Uzgiris
holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and received an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Newark University.
His publishing credits include Atlanta Review, Barrow Street, Hudson Review, AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, and other journals.
His book reviews have been published in HTML Giant and Rumpus, and his fiction will be appearing in Writer’s Abroad: Foreign Encounters Anthology.
He has received a Fulbright Scholar Grant to teach and write at Vilnius University, Lithuania during the 2012-13 academic year.
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Another Hades
Bumps River Road curls like a civilized child,
asleep by the salt marsh, dropped into the wild.
Now and then, it belches car noise and fumes
over an oily-blue stream which in summer blooms
with Yellow Legs, White Egrets, Green Herons,
and at low tide, Ruddy Turnstones come to glean
from the muck of so many bodies lacking means
for resurrection—unceremoniously undone and unclean,
coagulated into a dark, composting mass, numberless . . .
a challenge for even Odysseus to sort through—
all limbs, roots, rot and slime—searching for Tiresias.
But any prophet can read the obvious signs: You too
shall end up . . . mud. Meanwhile, the crabs—
Fiddler, Hermit, and Blue—scuttle and grab.
The Divining Rod
Science does not understand
what can be found
with a sensitive hand—
by a mind wound around
a stick that corresponds
to surging water underground,
much as a forester finds
a deep-hidden clearing
by the different sounds of birds.
We try by means of thinking
to open up some fresh space
within what others were saying.
Whatever might be our place,
remember that grasses grow,
and seeds will burst their case,
as long as they reach down below
for the water that each of us seeks
and only a feeling can bestow.
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