Сочинения Иосифа Бродского. Том IV

Ultimately, there should be a language
in which the word «egg» is reduced to O
entirely. The Italian comes the closest,
naturally, with its uova

. That’s why Alighieri thoughtit the healthiest food, sharing the predilection
with sopranos and tenors whose pear-like torsos
in the final analysis embody «opera».
The same pertains to the truly Romantic, that is,
German poets, with practically every line
starting the way they’d begin a breakfast,
or to the equally cocky mathematicians
brooding over their regularly laid infinity,
whose immaculate zeros won’t ever hatch.

1996

REVEILLE

Birds acquaint themselves with leaves.
Hired hands roll up their sleeves.
In a brick malodorous dorm
boys awake awash in sperm.

Clouds of patently absurd

but endearing shapes assert
the resemblance of their lot
to a cumulative thought.

As the sun displays its badge

to the guilty world at large,
scruffy masses have to rise,
unless ordered otherwise.

Now let’s see what one can’t see

elsewhere in the galaxy:
life on earth, of which its press
makes a lot and comets less.

As a picture doomed to sneak

previews only, it’s unique
even though some action must
leave its audience aghast.

Still, the surplus of the blue

up on high supplies a clue
as to why our moral laws
won’t receive their due applause.

What we used to blame on gods

now gets chalked up to the odds
of small particles whose sum
makes you miss the older sham.

Yet regardless of the cause,

or effects that make one pause,
one is glad that one has been
caught this morning in between.

Painted by a gentle dawn

one is proud that like one’s own
planet now one will not wince
at what one is facing, since

putting up with nothing whose

company we cannot lose
hardens rocks and — rather fast —
hearts as well. But rocks will last.

1996

TSUSHIMA SCREEN

The perilous yellow sun follows with its slant eyes
masts of the shuddered grove steaming up to capsize
in the frozen straits of Epiphany. February has fewer
days than the other months; therefore, it’s more cruel
than the rest. Dearest, it’s more sound
to wrap up our sailing round
the globe with habitual naval grace,
moving your cot to the fireplace
where our dreadnought is going under
in great smoke. Only fire can grasp a winter!
Golden unharnessed stallions in the chimney
dye their manes to more corvine shades as they near the finish,
and the dark room fills with the plaintive, incessant chirring
of a naked, lounging grasshopper one cannot cup in fingers.

1978

FOLK TUNE