The dead keep their own counsel, let nothing slip
About incarceration, so it was judged
Fitting to have the funeral back home.
Home now had changed. We lived, uncle and I,
In a whole house of our own with a German cook.
The body was laid out in the living room
In a casket lined with tufted tea-rose silk,
Upholstered like a Victorian love-seat.
He had never been so comfortable. He looked
Almost my age, more my age than my uncle’s,
Since half his forty years had not been lived,
Had merely passed, like birthdays or the weather.
He was, strangely enough, a total stranger
Who bore a clear family resemblance.
And there was torture in my uncle’s face
Such as I did not even see at war.
The flowers were suffocating. It was like drowning.
The day after the burial I enlisted,
And two and a half years later was mustered out
As a Section Eight, mentally unsound.
VI
What is our happiest, most cherished dream
Of paradise? Not harps and fugues and feathers
But rather arrested action, an escape
From time, from history, from evolution
Into the blessèd stasis of a painting :
Those tributes, homages, apotheoses
Figured upon the ceilings of the rich
Wherein some rather boorish-looking count,
With game leg and bad breath, roundly despised
By all of his contemporaries, rises
Into the company of the heavenly host
(A pimpled donor among flawless saints)
Viewed by us proletarians on the floor
From under his thick ham and dangled calf
As he is borne beyond our dark resentment
On puffy quilts and comforters of cloud.
Suspended always at that middle height
In numinous diffusions of soft light,
In mild soft-focus, in the “tinted steam”
Of Turner’s visions of reality,
He is established at a pitch of triumph,
That shall not fail him, by the painter’s skill.
Yet in its way even the passage of time
Seems to inch toward a vast and final form,
To mimic the grand metastasis of art,
As if all were ordained. As the writ saith :
The fathers (and their brothers) shall eat grapes
And the teeth of the children shall be set on edge.
Ho fatto un fiasco, which is to say,
I’ve made a sort of bottle of my life,
A frangible and a transparent failure.
My efforts at their best are negative :
A poor attempt not to hurt anyone,
A goal which, in the very nature of things,
Is ludicrous because impossible.
Viscid, contaminate, dynastic wastes
Flood through the dark canals, the underpasses,
Ducts and arterial sluices of my body
As through those gutters of which Swift once wrote :
“Sweepings from Butcher Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,
Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud,
Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.”
At least I pass them on to nobody,
Not having married, or authored any children,
Leading a monkish life of modest means
On a trust fund established by my uncle
In a will of which I am the single heir.
I am not young any more, and not very well,
Subject to nightmares and to certain fevers
The doctors cannot cure. There’s a Madonna
Set in an alley shrine near where I live
Whose niche is filled with little votive gifts,
Like cookie molds, of pressed tin eyes and legs
And organs she has mercifully cured.
She is not pretty, she is not high art,
But in my infidel way I’m fond of her—
Saint Mary Paregoric, Comforter.
Were she to cure me, what could I offer her?
The gross, intestinal wormings of the brain?
A virus’s life-span is twenty minutes.
Think of its evolutionary zeal,
Like the hyper-active balance-wheel of a watch,
Busy with swift mutations, trundling through
Its own Silurian epochs in a week;
By fierce ambition and Darwinian wit
Acquiring its immunities against
Our warfares and our plagues of medication.
Blessed be the unseen micro-organisms,
For without doubt they shall inherit the earth.
Their generations shall be as the sands of the sea.
I am the dying host by which they live;
In me they dwell and thrive and have their being.
I am the tapered end of a long line,
The thin and febrile phylum of my family :
Of all my father’s brothers the one child.
I wander these by-paths and little squares,
A singular Tyrannosauros Rex,
Sauntering towards extinction, an obsolete
Left-over from a weak ancien régime
About to be edged out by upstart germs.
I shall pay out the forfeit with my life
In my own lingering way. Just as my uncle,
Who, my blood tells me on its nightly rounds,
May perhaps be “a little more than kin,”
Has paid the price for his unlawful grief
And bloodless butchery by creating me
His guilty legatee, the beneficiary
Of his money and his crimes.
In these late days
I find myself frequently at the window,
Its glass a cooling comfort to my temple.
And I lift up mine eyes, not to the hills
Of which there are not any, but to the clouds.
Here is a sky determined to maintain
The reputation of Tiepolo,
A moving vision of a shapely mist,
Full of the splendor of the insubstantial.
Against a diorama of palest blue
Cloud-curds, cloud-stacks, cloud-bushes sun themselves.
Giant confections, impossible meringues,
Soft coral reefs and powdery tumuli
Pass in august processions and calm herds.
Great stadiums, grandstands and amphitheaters,
The tufted, opulent litters of the gods
They seem; or laundered bunting, well-dressed wigs,
Harvests of milk-white, Chinese peonies
That visibly rebuke our stinginess.
For all their ghostly presences, they take on
A colorful nobility at evening.
Off to the east the sky begins to turn
Lilac so pale it seems a mood of gray,
Gradually, like the death of virtuous men.
Streaks of electrum richly underline
The slow, flat-bottomed hulls, those floated lobes
Between which quills and spokes of light fan out
Into carnelian reds and nectarines,
Nearing a citron brilliance at the center,
The searing furnace of the glory hole
That fires and fuses clouds of muscatel
With pencilings of gold. I look and look,
As though I could be saved simply by looking—
I, who have never earned my way, who am
No better than a viral parasite,
Or the lees of the Venetian underworld,
Foolish and muddled in my later years,
Who was never even at one time a wise child.
III
TWO POEMS BY JOSEPH BRODSKY
VERSIONS BY ANTHONY HECHT
C
APE COD LULLABY
I
The Eastern tip of the Empire dives into night;
Cicadas fall silent over some empty lawn;
On classic pediments inscriptions dim from the sight
As a finial cross darkens and then is gone
Like the nearly empty bottle on the table.
From the empty street’s patrol-car a refrain
Of Ray Charles’ keyboard tinkles away like rain.
Crawling to a vacant beach from the vast wet
Of ocean, a crab digs into sand laced with sea-lather
And sleeps. A giant clock on a brick tower
Rattles its scissors. The face is drenched with sweat.
The street lamps glisten in the stifling weather,
Formally spaced,
Like white shirt buttons open to the waist.
It’s stifling. The eye’s guided by a blinking stop-light
In its journey to the whiskey across the room
On the night-stand. The heart stops dead a moment, but its dull boom
Goes on, and the blood, on pilgrimage gone forth,
Comes back to a crossroad. The body, like an upright,
Rolled-up road-map, lifts an eyebrow in the North.
It’s strange to think of surviving, but that’s what happened.
Dust settles on furnishings, and a car bends length
Around corners in spite of Euclid. And the deepened
Darkness makes up for the absence of people, of voices,
And so forth, and alters them, by its cunning and strength,
Not to deserters, to ones who have taken flight,
But rather to those now disappeared from sight.
It’s stifling. And the thick leaves’ rasping sound
Is enough all by itself to make you sweat.
What seems to be a small dot in the dark
Could only be one thing—a star. On the deserted ground
Of a basketball court a vagrant bird has set
Its fragile egg in the steel hoop’s ravelled net.
There’s a smell of mint now, and of mignonette.
II
Like a despotic Sheik, who can be untrue
To his vast seraglio and multiple desires
Only with a harem altogether new,
Varied and numerous, I have switched Empires.
A step dictated by the acrid, live
Odor of burning carried on the air
From all four quarters (a time for silent prayer!)
And, from the crow’s high vantage point, from five.
Like a snake charmer, like the Pied Piper of old,
Playing my flute I passed the green janissaries,
My testes sensing their pole axe’s sinister cold,
As when one wades into water. And then with the brine
Of sea-water sharpness filling, flooding the mouth,
I crossed the line
And sailed into muttony clouds. Below me curled
Serpentine rivers, roads bloomed with dust, ricks yellowed,
And everywhere in that diminished world,
In formal opposition, near and far,
Lined up like print in a book about to close,
Armies rehearsed their games in balanced rows
And cities all went dark as caviar.
And then the darkness thickened. All lights fled,
A turbine droned, a head ached rhythmically,
And space backed up like a crab, time surged ahead
Into first place, and streaming westwardly,
Seemed to be heading home, void of all light,
Soiling its garments with the tar of night.
I fell asleep. When I awoke to the day,
Magnetic north had strengthened its deadly pull.
I beheld new heavens, I beheld the earth made new.
It lay
Turning to dust, as flat things always do.
III
Being itself the essence of all things,
Solitude teaches essentials. How gratefully the skin
Receives the leathery coolness of its chair.
Meanwhile my arm, off in the dark somewhere,
Goes wooden in sympathetic brotherhood
With the chair’s listless arm of oaken wood.
A glowing oaken grain
Covers the tiny bones of the joints. And the brain
Knocks like the glass’s ice-cube tinkling.
It’s stifling. On a pool hall’s steps, in a dim glow,
Somebody striking a match rescues his face
Of an old black man from the enfolding dark
For a flaring moment. The white-toothed portico
Of the District Courthouse sinks in the thickened lace
Of foliage, and awaits the random search
Of passing headlights. High up on its perch,
Like the fiery warning at Belshazzar’s Feast,
The inscription, Coca-Cola, hums in red.
In the Country Club’s unweeded flowerbed
A fountain whispers its secrets. Unable to rouse
A simple tirra lirra in these dull boughs,
A strengthless breeze rustles the tattered, creased
News of the world, its obsolete events,
Against an improvised, unlikely fence
Of iron bedsteads. It’s stifling. Leaning on his rifle,
The Unknown Soldier grows even more unknown.
Against a concrete jetty, in dull repose
A trawler scrapes the rusty bridge of its nose.
A weary, buzzing ventilator mills
The U.S.A.’s hot air with metal gills.
Like a carried-over number in addition,
The sea comes up in the dark
And on the beach it leaves its delible mark,
And the unvarying, diastolic motion,
The repetitious, drugged sway of the ocean
Cradles a splinter adrift for a million years.
If you step sideways off the pier’s
Edge, you’ll continue to fall toward those tides
For a long, long time, your hands stiff at your sides,
But you will make no splash.
IV
The change of Empires is intimately tied
To the hum of words, the soft, fricative spray
Of spittle in the act of speech, the whole
Sum of Lobachevsky’s angles, the strange way
That parallels may unwittingly collide
By casual chance some day
As longitudes contrive to meet at the pole.
And the change is linked as well to the chopping of wood,
To the tattered lining of life turned inside out
And thereby changed to a garment dry and good
(To tweed in winter, linen in a heat spell)
And the brain’s kernel hardening in its shell.
In general, of all our organs the eye
Alone retains its elasticity,
Pliant, adaptive as a dream or wish.
For the change of Empires is linked with far-flung sight,
With the long gaze cast across the ocean’s tide
(Somewhere within us lives a dormant fish)
And the mirror’s revelation that the part in your hair
That you meticulously placed on the left side
Mysteriously shows up on the right,
Linked to weak gums, to heartburn brought about
By a diet unfamiliar and alien,
To the intense blankness, to the pristine white
Of the mind, which corresponds to the plain, small
Blank page of letterpaper on which you write.
But now the giddy pen
Points out resemblances, for after all,
The device in your hand is the same old pen and ink
As before, the woodland plants exhibit no change
Of leafage, and the same old bombers range
The clouds toward who knows what
Precisely chosen,
carefully targeted spot.
And what you really need now is a drink.
V
New England towns seem much as if they were cast
Ashore along its coastline, beached by a flood-
Tide, and shining in darkness mile after mile
With imbricate, speckled scales of shingle and tile,
Like schools of sleeping fish hauled in by the vast
Nets of a continent that was first discovered
By herring and by cod. But neither cod
Nor herring have had any noble statues raised
In their honor, even though the memorial date
Could be comfortably omitted. As for the great
Flag of the place, it bears no blazon or mark
Of the first fish-founder among its parallel bars,
And as Louis Sullivan might perhaps have said,
Seen in the dark,
It looks like a sketch of towers thrust among stars.
Stifling. A man on his porch has wound a towel
Around his throat. A pitiful, small moth
Batters the window screen and bounces off
Like a bullet that Nature has zeroed in on itself
From an invisible ambush,
Aiming for some improbable bullseye
Right smack in the middle of July.
Because watches keep ticking, pain washes away
With the years. If time picks up the knack
Of panacea, it’s because time can’t abide
Being rushed, or finally turns insomniac.
And walking or swimming, the dreams of one hemisphere (heads)
Swarm with the nightmares, the dark, sinister play
Of its opposite (tails), its double, its underside.
Stifling. Great motionless plants. A distant bark.
A nodding head now jerks itself upright
To keep faces and phone numbers from sliding into the dark
And off the precarious edge of memory.
In genuine tragedy
It’s not the fine hero that finally dies, it seems,
But, from constant wear and tear, night after night,
The old stage set itself, giving way at the seams.
VI
Since it’s too late by now to say “goodbye”
And expect from time and space any reply
Except an echo that sounds like “here’s your tip,”
Collected Earlier Poems Page 19
