Сочинения Иосифа Бродского. Том IV

If you were drowning, I’d come to the rescue,
wrap you in my blanket and pour hot tea.
If I were a sheriff, I’d arrest you
and keep you in a cell under lock and key.

If you were a bird, I’d cut a record

and listen all night long to your high-pitched trill.
If I were a sergeant, you’d be my recruit,
and boy, I can assure you, you’d love the drill.

If you were Chinese, I’d learn the language,

burn a lot of incense, wear funny clothes.
If you were a mirror, I’d storm the Ladies’,
give you my red lipstick, and puff your nose.

If you loved volcanoes, I’d be lava,

relentlessly erupting from my hidden source.
And if you were my wife, I’d be your lover,
because the Church is firmly against divorce.

1995

ODE TO CONCRETE

You’ll outlast me, good old concrete,
as I’ve outlasted, it seems, some men
who had taken me, too, for a kind of street,
citing color of eyes, or mien.

So I praise your inanimate, porous looks

not out of envy but as the next
of kin — less durable, plagued with loose
joints, though still grateful to the architects.

I applaud your humble — to be exact,

meaningless — origins, roar and screech,
fully matched, however, by the abstract
destination, beyond my reach.

It’s not that nothing begets its kind

but that the future prefers to court
a date that’s resolutely blind
and wrapped in a petrified long skirt.

1995

AT THE CITY DUMP IN NANTUCKET

To Stephen White

The perishable devours the perishable in broad daylight,
moribund in its turn in late November:
the seagulls, trashing the dump, are trying to outnumber
the snow, or have it at least delayed.

The reckless primordial alphabet, savaging every which

way the oxygen wall, constitutes a preface
to the anarchy of the refuse:
in the beginning, there was a screech.

In their stammering Ws one reads not hunger but

the prurience of comma-sharp talons toward
what outlasts them, or else a torn-out
page’s flight from the volume’s fat,

while some mad anemometer giddily spins its cups

like a haywire tea ceremony, and the Atlantic
is breasting grimly with its athletic
swells the darkening overcast.

1995–1996

AB OVO