Читать онлайн "Сочинения Иосифа Бродского. Том IV" - Бродский Иосиф Александрович - RuLit

Eighteen years I’ve spent in Manhattan. The landlord was good, but he turned bad. A scumbag, actually. Man, I hate him. Money is green, but it flows like blood.

I guess I’ve got to move across the river. New Jersey beckons with its sulphur glow. Say, numbered years are a lesser evil. Money is green, but it doesn’t grow.

I’ll take away my furniture, my old sofa. But what should I do with my windows’ view? I feel like I’ve been married to it, or something. Money is green, but it makes you blue.

A body on the whole knows where it’s going. I guess it’s one’s soul that makes one pray, even though above it’s just a Boeing. Money is green, and I am gray.

1992

Here’s your mom, here’s your dad. Welcome to being their flesh and blood. Why do you look so sad?

Here’s your food, here’s your drink. Also some thoughts, if you care to think. Welcome to everything.

Here’s your practically clean slate. Welcome to it, though it’s kind of late. Welcome at any rate.

Here’s your paycheck, here’s your rent. Money is nature’s fifth element. Welcome to every cent.

Here’s your swarm and your huge beehive. Welcome to the place with its roughly five billion like you alive.

Welcome to the phone book that stars your name. Digits are democracy’s secret aim. Welcome to your claim to fame.

Here’s your marriage, and here’s divorce. Now that’s the order you can’t reverse. Welcome to it; up yours.

Here’s your blade, here’s your wrist. Welcome to playing your own terrorist; call it your Middle East.

Here’s your mirror, your dental gleam. Here’s an octopus in your dream. Why do you try to scream?

Here’s your corncob, your TV set. Your candidate suffering an upset. Welcome to what he said.

Here’s your porch, see the cars pass by. Here’s your shitting dog’s guilty eye. Welcome to its alibi.

Here are your cicadas, then a chickadee, the bulb’s dry tear in your lemon tea. Welcome to infinity.

Here are your pills on the plastic tray, your disappointing, crisp X-ray. You are welcome to pray.

Here’s your cemetery, a well-kept glen. Welcome to a voice that says «Amen». The end of the rope, old man.

Here’s your will, and here’s a few takers. Here’s an empty pew. Here’s life after you.

And here are your stars which appear still keen on shining as though you had never been. They might have a point, old bean.

Here’s your afterlife, with no trace of you, especially of your face. Welcome, and call it space.

Welcome to where one cannot breathe. This way, space resembles what’s underneath, and Saturn holds the wreath.

1992

There is a meadow in Sweden where I lie smitten, eyes stained with clouds’ white ins and outs.

And about that meadow roams my widow plaiting a clover wreath for her lover.

I took her in marriage in a granite parish. The snow lent her whiteness, a pine was a witness.

She’d swim in the oval lake whose opal mirror, framed by bracken, felt happy broken.

And at night the stubborn sun of her auburn hair shone from my pillow at post and pillar.

Now in the distance I hear her descant. She sings «Blue Swallow», but I can’t follow.

The evening shadow robs the meadow of width and color. It’s getting colder.

As I lie dying here, I’m eyeing stars. Here’s Venus; no one between us.

1990–1993

Since mistakes are inevitable, I can easily be taken for a man standing before you in this room filled with yourselves. Yet in about one hour this will be corrected, at your and at my expense, and the place will be reclaimed by elemental particles free from the rigidity of a particular human shape or type of assembly. Some particles are still free. It’s not all dust.

So my unwillingness to admit it’s I facing you now, or the other way around, has less to do with my modesty or solipsism than with my respect for the premises’ instant future, for those aforementioned free-floating particles settling upon the shining surface of my brain. Inaccessible to a wet cloth eager to wipe them off.

The most interesting thing about emptiness is that it is preceded by fullness. The first to understand this were, I believe, the Greek gods, whose forte indeed was absence. Regard, then, yourselves as rehearsing perhaps for the divine encore, with me playing obviously to the gallery. We all act out of vanity. But I am in a hurry.

Once you know the future, you can make it come earlier. The way it’s done by statues or by one’s furniture. Self-effacement is not a virtue but a necessity, recognized most often toward evening. Though numerically it is easier not to be me than not to be you. As the swan confessed to the lake: I don’t like myself. But you are welcome to my reflection.