Сочинения Иосифа Бродского. Том IV

One more Christmas ends
soaking stripes and stars.
All my Polish friends
are behind steel bars,
locked like zeroes in
some graph sheet of wrath:
as a discipline
slavery beats math.

Nations learn the rules

like a naughty boy
as the tyrant drools
manacles in joy.
One pen stroke apiece,
minus edits plus
helping the police
to subtract a class.

From a stubborn brow

something scarlet drops
on the Christmas snow.
As it turns, the globe’s
face gets uglier,
pores becoming cells,
while the planets glare
coldly, like ourselves.

Hungry faces. Grime.

Squalor. Unabashed
courts distribute time
to the people crushed
not so much by tanks
or by submachine
guns as by the banks
we deposit in.

Deeper than the depth

of your thoughts or mine
is the sleep of death
in the Vujek mine;
higher than your rent
is that hand whose craft
keeps the others bent —
as though photographed.

Powerless is speech.

Still, it bests a tear
in attempts to reach,
crossing the frontier,
for the heavy hearts
of my Polish friends.
One more trial starts.
One more Christmas ends.

1980

CAFÉ TRIESTE: SAN FRANCISCO

To L. G.

To this corner of Grant and Vallejo
I’ve returned like an echo
to the lips that preferred
then a kiss to a word.

Nothing has changed here. Neither

the furniture nor the weather.
Things, in one’s absence, gain
permanence, stain by stain.

Cold, through the large steamed windows

I watch the gesturing weirdos,
the bloated breams that warm
up their aquarium.

Evolving backward, a river

becomes a tear, the real
becomes memory which
can, like fingertips, pinch

just the tail of a lizard

vanishing in the desert
which was eager to fix
a traveler with a sphinx.

Your golden mane! Your riddle!

The lilac skirt, the brittle
ankles! The perfect ear
rendering «read» as «dear».

Under what cloud’s pallor

now throbs the tricolor
of your future, your past
and present, swaying the mast?

Upon what linen waters

do you drift bravely toward
new shores, clutching your beads
to meet the savage needs?

Still, if sins are forgiven,

that is, if souls break even
with flesh elsewhere, this joint,
too, must be enjoyed

as afterlife’s sweet parlor

where, in the clouded squalor,
saints and the ain’ts take five,
where I was first to arrive.

1980

THE BERLIN WALL TUNE

To Peter Viereck