Joseph Brodsky

The last twenty years were good for practically everybody save the dead. But maybe for them as well. Maybe the Almighty Himself has turned a bit bourgeois and uses a credit card. For otherwise time’s passage makes no sense. Hence memories, recollections, values, deportment. One hopes one hasn’t spent one’s mother or father or both, or a handful of friends entirely as they cease to hound one’s dreams. One’s dreams, unlike the city, become less populous the older one gets. That’s why the eternal rest cancels analysis. The last twenty years were good for practically everybody and constituted the afterlife for the dead. Its quality could be questioned but not its duration. The dead, one assumes, would not mind attaining a homeless status, and sleep in archways or watch pregnant submarines returning to their native pen after a worldwide journey without destroying life on earth, without even a proper flag to hoist. 1992

In the cold season, in a locality accustomed to heat more than to cold, to horizontality more than to a mountain, a child was born in a cave in order to save the world; it blew as only in deserts in winter it blows, athwart. To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother’s breast, the steam out of the ox’s nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior—the team of Magi, their presents heaped by the door, ajar. He was but a dot, and a dot was the star. Keenly, without blinking, through pallid, stray clouds, upon the child in the manger, from far away— from the depth of the universe, from its opposite end—the star was looking into the cave. And that was the Father’s stare. December 1987

Here’s your mom, here’s your dad. Welcome to being their flesh and blood. Why do you look so sad? Here’s your food, here’s your drink. Also some thoughts, if you care to think. Welcome to everything. Here’s your practically clean slate. Welcome to it, though it’s kind of late. Welcome at any rate. ____ Here’s your paycheck, here’s your rent. Money is nature’s fifth element. Welcome to every cent. Here’s your swarm and your huge beehive. Welcome to the place with its roughly five billion like you alive. Welcome to the phone book that stars your name. Digits are democracy’s secret aim. Welcome to your claim to fame. ____ Here’s your marriage, and here’s divorce. Now that’s the order you can’t reverse. Welcome to it; up yours, Here’s your blade, here’s your wrist. Welcome to playing your own terrorist; call it your Middle East. Here’s your mirror, your dental gleam. Here’s an octopus in your dream. Why do you try to scream? ____ Here’s your corncob, your TV set. Your candidate suffering an upset. Welcome to what he said. Here’s your porch, see the cars pass by. Here’s your shitting dog’s guilty eye. Welcome to its alibi. Here are your cicadas, then a chickadee, the bulb’s dry tear in your lemon tea. Welcome to infinity. ____ Here are your pills on the plastic tray, your disappointing, crisp X-ray. You are welcome to pray. Here’s your cemetery, a well-kept glen. Welcome to a voice that says “Amen.” The end of the rope, old man. Here’s your will, and here’s a few takers. Here’s an empty pew. Here’s life after you. ____ And here are your stars which appear still keen on shining as though you had never been. They might have a point, old bean. Here’s your afterlife, with no trace of you, especially of your face. Welcome, and call it space. Welcome to where one cannot breathe. This way, space resembles what’s underneath, and Saturn holds the wreath.

I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshland by zinc-gray breakers that always marched on in twos. Hence all rhymes, hence that wan flat voice that ripples between them like hair still moist, if it ripples at all. Propped on a pallid elbow, the helix picks out of them no sea rumble but a clap of canvas, of shutters, of hands, a kettle on the burner, boiling—lastly, the seagull’s metal cry. What keeps hearts from falseness in this flat region is that there is nowhere to hide and plenty of room for vision. Only sound needs echo and dreads its lack. A glance is accustomed to no glance back A list of some observations. In a corner, it’s warm. A glance leaves an imprint on anything it’s dwelt on. Water is glass’s most public form. Man is more frightening than his skeleton. A nowhere winter evening with wine. A black porch resists an osier’s stiff assaults. Fixed on an elbow, the body bulks like a glacier’s debris, a moraine of sorts. A millenium hence, they’ll no doubt expose a fossil bivalve propped behind this gauze cloth, with the print of lips under the print of fringe, mumbling “Good night” to a window hinge. I recognize this wind battering the limp grass that submits to it as they did to the Tartar mass. I recognize this leaf splayed in the roadside mud like a prince empurpled in his own blood. Fanning wet arrows that blow aslant the cheek of a wooden hut in another land, autumn tells, like geese by their flying call, a tear by its face. And as I roll my eyes to the ceiling, I chant herein not the lay of that eager man’s campaign but utter your Kazakh name which till now was stored in my throat as a password into the Horde. A navy-blue dawn in a frosted pane recalls yellow streetlamps in the snow-piled lane, icy pathways, crossroads, drifts on either hand, a jostling cloakroom in Europe’s eastern end. “Hannibal...” drones on there, a worn-out motor, parallel bars in the gym reek with armpit odor; as for that scary blackboard you failed to see through, it has stayed just as black. And its reverse side, too. Silvery hoarfrost has transformed the rattling bell into crystal. As regards all that parallel- line stuff, it’s turned out true and bone-clad, indeed. Don’t want to get up now. And never did. You’ve forgotten that village lost in the rows and rows of swamp in a pine-wooded territory where no scarecrows ever stand in orchards: the crops aren’t worth it, and the roads are also just ditches and brushwood surface. Old Nastasia is dead, I take it, and Pesterev, too, for sure, and if not, he’s sitting drunk in the cellar or is making something out of the headboard of our bed: a wicket gate, say, or some kind of shed. And in winter they’re chopping wood, and turnips is all they live on, and a star blinks from all the smoke in the frosty heaven, and no bride in chintz at the window, but dust’s gray craft, plus the emptiness where once we loved. In the little town out of which death sprawled over the classroom map the cobblestones shine like scales that coat a carp, on the secular chestnut tree melting candles hang, and a cast-iron lion pines for a good harangue. Through the much laundered, pale window gauze woundlike carnations and kirchen needles ooze; a tram rattles far off, as in days of yore, but no one gets off at the stadium anymore. The real end of the war is a sweet blonde’s frock across a Viennese armchair’s fragile back while the humming winged silver bullets fly, taking lives southward, in mid-July. Munich As for the stars, they are always on. That is, one appears, then others adorn the inklike sphere. That’s the best way from there to look upon here: well after hours, blinking. The sky looks better when they are off. Though, with them, the conquest of space is quicker. Provided you haven’t got to move from the bare veranda and squeaking rocker. As one spacecraft pilot has said, his face half sunk in the shadow, it seems there is no life anywhere, and a thoughtful gaze can be rested on none of these. Near the ocean, by candlelight. Scattered farms, fields overrun with sorrel, lucerne, and clover. Toward nightfall, the body, like Shiva, grows extra arms reaching out yearningly to a lover. A mouse rustles through grass. An owl drops down. Suddenly creaking rafters expand a second. One sleeps more soundly in a wooden town, since you dream these days only of things that happened. There’s a smell of fresh fish. An armchair’s profile is glued to the wall. The gauze is too limp to bulk at the slightest breeze.. And a ray of the moon, meanwhile, draws up the tide like a slipping blanket. The Laocoön of a tree, casting the mountain weight off his shoulders, wraps them in an immense cloud. From a promontory, wind gushes in. A voice pitches high, keeping words on a string of sense. Rain surges down; its ropes twisted into lumps, lash, like the bather’s shoulders, the naked backs of these hills. The Medhibernian Sea stirs round colonnaded stumps like a salt tongue behind broken teeth. The heart, however grown savage, still beats for two. Every good boy deserves fingers to indicate that beyond today there is always a static to- morrow, like a subject’s shadowy predicate. If anything’s to be praised, it’s most likely how the west wind becomes the east wind, when a frozen bough sways leftward, voicing its creaking protests, and your cough flies across the Great Plains to Dakota’s forests. At noon, shouldering a shotgun, fire at what may well be a rabbit in snowfields, so that a shell widens the breach between the pen that puts up these limping awkward lines and the creature leaving real tracks in the white. On occasion the head combines its existence with that of a hand, not to fetch more lines but to cup an ear under the pouring slur of their common voice. Like a new centaur. There is always a possibility left—to let yourself out to the street whose brown length will soothe the eye with doorways, the slender forking of willows, the patchwork puddles, with simply walking. The hair on my gourd is stirred by a breeze and the street, in distance, tapering to a V, is like a face to a chin; and a barking puppy flies out of a gateway like crumpled paper. A street. Some houses, let’s say, are better than others. To take one item, some have richer windows. What’s more, if you go insane, it won’t happen, at least, inside them. ... and when “the future” is uttered, swarms of mice rush out of the Russian language and gnaw a piece of ripened memory which is twice as hole-ridden as real cheese. After all these years it hardly matters who or what stands in the corner, hidden by heavy drapes, and your mind resounds not with a seraphic “do,” only their rustle. Life, that no one dares to appraise, like that gift horse’s mouth, bares its teeth in a grin at each encounter. What gets left of a man amounts to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech. Not that I am losing my grip; I am just tired of summer. You reach for a shirt in a drawer and the day is wasted. If only winter were here for snow to smother all these streets, these humans; but first, the blasted green. I would sleep in my clothes or just pluck a borrowed book, while what’s left of the year’s slack rhythm, like a dog abandoning its blind owner, crosses the road at the usual zebra. Freedom is when you forget the spelling of the tyrant’s name and your mouth’s saliva is sweeter than Persian pie, and though your brain is wrung tight as the horn of a ram nothing drops from your pale-blue eye. 1975-76

The scorching noon, the vale in Dagestan... -Mikhail Lermontov I A bullet’s velocity in low temperatures greatly depends on its target’s virtues, on its urge to warm up in the plaited muscles of the torso, in the neck’s webbed sinews. Stones lie flat like a second army. The shade hugs the loam to itself willy-nilly. The sky resembles peeling stucco. An aircraft dissolves in it like a clothes moth, and like a spring from a ripped-up mattress an explosion sprouts up. Outside the crater, the blood, like boiled milk, powerless to seep into the ground, is seized by a film’s hard ripples. II Shepherd and sower, the North is driving herds to the sea, spreading cold to the South. A bright, frosty noon in a Wogistan valley. A mechanical elephant, trunk wildly waving at the horrid sight of the small black rodent of a snow-covered mine, spews out throat-clogging lumps, possessed of that old desire of Mahomet’s, to move a mountain. Summits loom white; the celestial warehouse lends them at noontime its flaking surplus. The mountains lack any motion, passing their immobility to the scattered bodies. III The doleful, echoing Slavic singing at evening in Asia. Dank and freezing, sprawling piles of human pig meat cover the caravansary’s mud bottom. The fuel dung smolders, legs stiffen in numbness. It smells of old socks, of forgotten bath days. The dreams are identical, as are the greatcoats. Plenty of cartridges, few recollections, and the tang in the mouth of too many “hurrahs.” Glory to those who, their glances lowered, marched in the sixties to abortion tables, sparing the homeland its present stigma. IV What is contained in the drone’s dull buzzing? And what in the sound of the aero-engine? Living is getting as complicated as building a house with grapes’ green marbles or little lean-tos with spades and diamonds. Nothing is stable (one puff and it’s over): families, private thoughts, clay shanties. Night over ruins of a mountain village. Armor, wetting its metal sheets with oil slick, freezes in thorn scrub. Afraid of drowning in a discarded jackboot, the moon hides in a cloud as in Allah’s turban. V Idle, inhaled now by no one, air. Imported, carelessly piled-up silence. Rising like dough that’s leavened, emptiness. If the stars had life-forms, space would erupt with a brisk ovation; a gunner, blinking, runs to the footlights. Murder’s a blatant way of dying, a tautology, the art form of parrots, a manual matter, the knack for catching life’s fly in the hairs of the gunsight by youngsters acquainted with blood through either hearsay or violating virgins. VI Pull up the blanket, dig a hole in the palliasse. Flop down and give ear to the oo of the siren. The Ice Age is coming—slavery’s ice age is coming, oozing over the atlas. Its moraines force under nations, fond memories, muslin blouses. Muttering, rolling our eyeballs upward, we are becoming a new kind of bivalve, our voice goes unheard, as though we were trilobites. There’s a draft from the corridor, draft from the square windows. Turn off the light, wrap up in a bundle. The vertebra craves eternity. Unlike a ringlet. In the morning the limbs are past all uncoiling. VII Up in the stratosphere, thought of by no one, the little bitch barks as she peers through the porthole: “Beach Ball! Beach Ball! Over. It's Rover.” The beach ball’s below. With the equator on it like a dog collar. Slopes, fields, and gullies repeat in their whiteness cheekbones (the color of shame has all gone to the banners). And the hens in their snowed-in hen coops, also a-shake from the shock of reveille, lay their eggs of immaculate color. If anything blackens, it’s just the letters, like the tracks of some rabbit, preserved by a wonder.

Wind from the northwestern quarter is lifting him high above the dove-gray, crimson, umber, brown Connecticut Valley. Far beneath, chickens daintily pause and move unseen in the yard of the tumbledown farmstead, chipmunks blend with the heath. Now adrift on the airflow, unfurled, alone, all that he glimpses—the hills’ lofty, ragged ridges, the silver stream that threads quivering like a living bone of steel, badly notched with rapids, the townships like strings of beads strewn across New England. Having slid down to nil thermometers—those household gods in niches— freeze, inhibiting thus the fire of leaves and churches’ spires. Still, no churches for him. In the windy reaches, undreamt of by the most righteous choir, he soars in a cobalt-blue ocean, his beak clamped shut, his talons clutched tight into his belly —claws balled up like a sunken fist— sensing in each wisp of down the thrust from below, glinting back the berry of his eyeball, heading south-southeast to the Rio Grande, the Delta, the beech groves and farther still: to a nest hidden in the mighty groundswell of grass whose edges no fingers trust, sunk amid forest’s odors, filled with splinters of red-speckled eggshell, with a brother or a sister’s ghost. The heart overgrown with flesh, down, feather, wing, pulsing at feverish rate, nonstopping, propelled by internal heat and sense, the bird goes slashing and scissoring the autumnal blue, yet by the same swift token, enlarging it at the expense of its brownish speck, barely registering on the eye, a dot, sliding far above the lofty pine tree; at the expense of the empty look of that child, arching up at the sky, that couple that left the car and lifted their heads, that woman on the stoop. But the uprush of air is still lifting him higher and higher. His belly feathers feel the nibbling cold. Casting a downward gaze, he sees the horizon growing dim, he sees, as it were, the features of the first thirteen colonies whose chimneys all puff out smoke. Yet it’s their total within his sight that tells the bird of his elevation, of what altitude he’s reached this trip. What am I doing at such a height? He senses a mixture of trepidation and pride. Heeling over a tip of wing, he plummets down. But the resilient air bounces him back, winging up to glory, to the colorless icy plane. His yellow pupil darts a sudden glare of rage, that is, a mix of fury and terror. So once again he turns and plunges down. But as walls return rubber balls, as sins send a sinner to faith, or near, he’s driven upward this time as well! He! whose innards are still so warm! Still higher! Into some blasted ionosphere! That astronomically objective hell of birds that lacks oxygen, and where the milling stars play millet served from a plate or a crescent. What, for the bipeds, has always meant height, for the feathered is the reverse. Not with his puny brain but with shriveled air sacs he guesses the truth of it: it’s the end. And at this point he screams. From the hooklike beak there tears free of him and flies ad luminem the sound Erinyes make to rend souls: a mechanical, intolerable shriek, the shriek of steel that devours aluminum; “mechanical,” for it’s meant for nobody, for no living ears: not man’s, not yelping foxes’, not squirrels’ hurrying to the ground from branches; not for tiny field mice whose tears can’t be avenged this way, which forces them into their burrows. And only hounds lift up their muzzles. A piercing, high-pitched squeal, more nightmarish than the D-sharp grinding of the diamond cutting glass, slashes the whole sky across. And the world seems to reel for an instant, shuddering from this rending. For the warmth burns space in the highest as badly as some iron fence down here brands incautious gloveless fingers. We, standing where we are, exclaim “There!” and see far above the tear that is a hawk, and hear the sound that lingers in wavelets, a spider skein swelling notes in ripples across the blue vault of space whose lack of echo spells, especially in October, an apotheosis of pure sound. And caught in this heavenly patterned lace, starlike, spangled with hoarfrost powder, silver-clad, crystal-bound, the bird sails to the zenith, to the dark-blue high of azure. Through binoculars we foretoken him, a glittering dot, a pearl. We hear something ring out in the sky, like some family crockery being broken, slowly falling aswirl, yet its shards, as they reach our palms, don’t hurt but melt when handled. And in a twinkling once more one makes out curls, eyelets, strings, rainbowlike, multicolored, blurred commas, ellipses, spirals, linking heads of barley, concentric rings— the bright doodling pattern the feather once possessed, a map, now a mere heap of flying pale flakes that make a green slope appear white. And the children, laughing and brightly dressed, swarm out of doors to catch them, crying with a loud shout in English, “Winter's here!”

Since the stern art of poetry calls for words, I, morose, deaf, and balding ambassador of a more or less insignificant nation that’s stuck in this super power, wishing to spare my old brain, hand myself my own topcoat and head for the main street: to purchase the evening paper. Wind disperses the foliage. The dimness of old bulbs in these sorry quarters, whose motto’s “The mirror will please,” gives a sense of abundance supported by puddles. Even thieves here steal apples by scratching the amalgam first. Yet the feeling one gets, from one’s own sweet reflection—this feeling I’ve lost. That’s what really puzzles. Everything in these parts is geared for winter: long dreams, prison walls, overcoats, bridal dresses of whiteness that seems snowlike. Drinks. Kinds of soap matching dirt in dark corners. Sparrow vests, second hand of the watch round your wrist, puritanical mores, underwear. And, tucked in the violinists’ palms, old redwood hand warmers. This whole realm is just static. Imagining the output of lead and cast iron, and shaking your stupefied head, you recall bayonets, Cossack whips of old power. Yet the eagles land like good lodestones on the scraps. Even wicker chairs here are built mostly with bolts and with nuts, one is bound to discover. Only fish in the sea seem to know freedom’s price. Still, their muteness compels us to sit and devise cashier booths of our own. And space rises like some bill of fare. Time’s invented by death. In its search for the objects, it deals with raw vegetables first That’s why cocks are so keen on the bells chiming deafly somewhere. To exist in the Era of Deeds and to stay elevated, alert ain’t so easy, alas. Having raised a long skirt, you will find not new wonders but what you expected. And it’s not that they play Lobachevsky’s ideas by ear, but the widened horizons should narrow somewhere, and here— here’s the end of perspective. Either old Europe’s map has been swiped by the gents in plain clothes, or the famous five-sixths of remaining landmass has just lost its poor infamous colleague, or a fairy casts spells over shabby me, who knows—but I cannot escape from this place; I pour wine for myself (service here’s a disgrace), sip, and rub my old tabby. Thus the brain earned a slug, as a spot where an error occurred earns a good pointing finger. Or should I hit waterways, sort of like Christ? Anyway, in these laudable quarters, eyes dumbfounded by ice and by booze will reproach you alike for whatever you choose: traceless rails, traceless waters. Now let’s see what they say in the papers about lawsuits. “The condemned has been dealt with.” Having read this, a denizen puts on his metal-rimmed glasses that help to relate it to a man lying flat, his face down, by the wall; though he isn’t asleep. Since dreams spurn a skull that has been perforated. The keen-sightedness of our era takes root in the times which were short, in their blindness, of drawing clear lines twixt those fallen from cradles and fallen from saddles. Though there are plenty of saucers, there is no one to turn tables with to subject you, poor Rurik, to a sensible quiz; that’s what really saddens. The keen-sightedness of our days is the sort that befits the dead end whose concrete begs for spittle and not for a witty comment. Wake up a dinosaur, not a prince, to recite you the moral! Birds have feathers for penning last words, though it’s better to ask. All the innocent head has in store for itself is an ax plus the evergreen laurel. [December] 1969 Leningrad

For V.S. When it’s Christmas we’re all of us magi. At the grocers’ all slipping and pushing. Where a tin of halvah, coffee-flavored, is the cause of a human assault-wave by a crowd heavy-laden with parcels: each one his own king, his own camel. Nylon bags, carrier bags, paper cones, caps and neckties all twisted up sideways. Reek of vodka and resin and cod, orange mandarins, cinnamon, apples. Floods of faces, no sign of a pathway toward Bethlehem, shut off by blizzard. And the bearers of moderate gifts leap on buses and jam all the doorways, disappear into courtyards that gape, though they know that there’s nothing inside there: not a beast, not a crib, nor yet her, round whose head gleams a nimbus of gold. Emptiness. But the mere thought of that brings forth lights as if out of nowhere. Herod reigns but the stronger he is, the more sure, the more certain the wonder. In the constancy of this relation is the basic mechanics of Christmas. That’s what they celebrate everywhere, for its coming push tables together. No demand for a star for a while, but a sort of good will touched with grace can be seen in all men from afar, and the shepherds have kindled their fires. Snow is falling: not smoking but sounding chimney pots on the roof, every face like a stain. Herod drinks. Every wife hides her child. He who comes is a mystery: features are not known beforehand, men’s hearts may not be quick to distinguish the stranger. But when drafts through the doorway disperse the thick mist of the hours of darkness and a shape in a shawl stands revealed, both a newborn and Spirit that’s Holy in your self you discover; you stare skyward, and it’s right there: a star.

Constancy is an evolution of one’s living quarters into a thought: a continuation of a parallelogram or a rectangle by means—as Clausewitz would have put it— of the voice and, ultimately, the gray matter. Ah, shrunken to the size of a brain-cell parlor with a lampshade, an armoire in the “Slavic Glory” fashion, four studded chairs, a sofa, a bed, a bedside table with little medicine bottles left there standing like a kremlin or, better yet, manhattan. To die, to abandon a family, to go away for good, to change hemispheres, to let new ovals be painted into the square—the more volubly will the gray cell insist on its actual measurements, demanding daily sacrifice from the new locale, from the furniture, from the silhouette in a yellow dress; in the end—from your very self. A spider revels in shading especially the fifth corner. Evolution is not a species’ adjustment to a new environment but one’s memories’ triumph over reality, the ichthyosaurus pining for the amoeba, the slack vertebrae of a train thundering in the darkness, past the mussel shells, tightly shut for the night, with their spineless, soggy, pearl-shrouding contents.

The Wise Men will unlearn your name. Above your head no star will flame. One weary sound will be the same— the hoarse roar of the gale. The shadows fall from your tired eyes as your lone bedside candle dies, for here the calendar breeds nights till stores of candles fail. What prompts this melancholy key? A long familiar melody. It sounds again. So let it be. Let it sound from this night. Let it sound in my hour of  death— as gratefulness of eyes and lips for that which sometimes makes us lift our gaze to the far sky. You glare in silence at the wall. Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all. It's clear that you are now too old to trust in good Saint Nick; that it's too late for miracles. —But suddenly, lifting your eyes to heaven's light, you realize: your life is a sheer gift.