Сочинения Иосифа Бродского. Том IV

ELEGY: FOR ROBERT LOWELL

I

In the autumnal blue
of your church-hooded New
England, the porcupine
sharpens its golden needles
against Bostonian bricks
to a point of needless
blinding shine.

White foam kneels and breaks

on the altar. People’s
eyes glitter inside
the church like pebbles
splashed by the tide.

What is Salvation, since

a tear magnifies like glass
a future perfect tense?
The choir, time and again,
sings in the key of the Cross
of Our Father’s gain,
which is but our loss.

There will be a lot,

a lot of Almighty Lord,
but not so much as a shred
of your flesh. When man dies
the wardrobe gapes instead.
We acquire the idle state
of your jackets and ties.

II

On the Charles’s bank
dark, crowding, printed letters
surround their sealed tongue.
A child, commalike, loiters
among dresses and pants
of vowels and consonants

that don’t make a word. The lack

of pen spells
their uselessness. And the black

Cadillac sails

through the screaming police sirens
like a new Odysseus keeping silence.

III

Planes at Logan thunder
off from the brown mass
of industrial tundra
with its bureaucratic moss.

Huge autoherds graze

on gray, convoluted, flat
stripes shining with grease
like an updated flag.

Shoals of cod and eel

that discovered this land before
Vikings or Spaniards still
beset the shore.

In the republic of ends

and means that counts each deed
poetry represents
the minority of the dead.

Now you become a part

of the inanimate, plain
terra of disregard
of the common pain.

IV

You knew far more
of death than he ever will
learn about you or
dare to reveal.

It might feel like an old

dark place with no match
to strike, where each word
is trying a latch.

Under this roof

flesh adopts all
the invisibility of
lingering soul.

In the sky with the false

song of the weathercock
your bell tolls
— a ceaseless alarm clock.

1977

A MARTIAL LAW CAROL

To Wiktor Woroszylski and Andrzej Drawicz