Drop your lover, don’t sing in the bathroom.
Who is speaking to me in the night?
I am speaking, by daylight even.
Who is answering the question?
Answering; ask another!
Translated by Alexandra Berlina
Even bluer than the toilet tiles.
Even whiter than the sleeping sinks.
Longer still than toilet rolls, unwound.
Quieter than gently splashing water
Is my morning path toward the empty
Swimming pools, along the hotel’s quiet
Corridors, in clean and rapid lifts,
All around a sanitary strictness.
Does all this bring something else to mind?
What it brings is something else to mind!
All alone, as if in a balloon,
And—just half a meter off the ground.
Translated by Alexandra Berlina
(a birthday on the train)
So I rode, and it’s always amazing
That the curtain keeps holding on, like
A madwoman, a suicide, with a trembling hand,
But then, whoosh, flies into the window after all.
In my compartment, they won’t look me in the eye,
As if last night, someone made a thorough search,
Lights on, all belongings rummaged through.
Or maybe a little bird has told them something,
Explaining that what awakes from sleep
In a humbled strait sleeve of my self and mumbles hi
Isn’t me, but an old man, an experienced worker,
His suitcase clinking with empty space.
How did I meet-and-greet my birthday on the train?
Like a sentry who overslept and missed his minute of glory.
For all that, what a marvelous dream it was,
Which we will see again at the final trial.
Translated by Alexandra Berlina
(half an hour on foot)
Like when in a diving windshield glass
The very first of glaciers showed up,
All-the-bus, as if at the embrasures,
At the window, we breathe halfmouthed,
And they show us, show us,
To the right and to the left and again,
The tireless whiteness.
Felt ashamed, but tears spilled awake,
So on foot, catching my breath,
Straightening my spine in steps, rushing,
I open immemorial vent panes,
Sweep away the invisible dust.
You’ll get up in the dark, as if late in a country house,
Listen to the time, listen to your blood.
And a glimpse of a pro-i-e, that’s all there was,
A coloring book, so what.
A blue balloon spins-’n’-swirls in the sky,
Over my head spins-’n’-swirls in the sky,
It wants to fall down, spins-’n’-swirls in the sky,
Don’t fall silent, I don’t.
Translated by Irina Shevelenko
from Physiology and Private History
July 3rd, 2004
(on your birthday we visit a cemetery*)
1.
I’ll now make a couple of
Glossy prints, tear open
A pack of Italic cigarettes,
Porno comics in cellophane,
The gentle sheath of the brain,
Under which there’s a smoky gray,
Breathing, like a spring,
A spring of this and that.
The cemetery floats in water,
A pie made of bricks.
Steamers, like water striders,
Scurry hither and thither.
The underage cypress has
A forced gloomy look,
Barely casting a shadow
On the neighborhood of shades.
While back there, in Russia, on Whit Monday
And on Soul Saturday, and thereabouts,
They’ve gathered together under the drizzle
By the friendly graves,
—
* The San Michele Cemetery in Venice, where Joseph Brodsky is buried.
They light their candles, and crumble their bread,
And eggshells fall on the ground,
Which the deceased, as far as I recall,
Just couldn’t stand.
So then, the colored eggshells crumble
Off, mosaically.
The compulsory glass transparently filled,
Rainwater it’s not.
You can see those who stood there
Through those who stand there;
Little wings sewn to their feet,
And sometimes on their backs.
… And here, with the cooing of turtledoves
Behind the stone wall,
In a heavy beam of sunlight,
With an albatross meowing,
In the whole horizontal hall
From the Lutherans to the Greeks,
One is hard-pressed to find four
Living legs to walk,
And here, with nothing but dust and ivy
And the Pompeian blue,
A wreath of faience flowers is
Like a little rosy mouth,
A vial of vodka lies in shabby grass,
And a pile of copper coins
Is provided to promise someone
They’ll be back.
Here, nothing is as he would’ve liked,
The one who wanted to lie here.
Here, nothing is as I would’ve liked
Where I would want to lie,
And nevertheless an obvious sense of rightness, which wasn’t mine,
Extended both time and space like a festive table.
2.
Doctors, lectors and actors, young widows
Leave their photos-and-cards,
Leave their bottles-and-hearts,
All their hurried confessions on the window-
Sill of love’s limit, the utmost, the upmost rung,
The final address—the gravestone,* but beyond
The gravestone, there is nothing, not a bond.
There is no more. Just money on your tongue.
America (his place of death), Europa
(The one he stole and bedded, his affair)
And native land (with hand outstretched elsewhere,
Her features covered up and bottom bare)—
The three perform a primavera ring,
Their heads together, in an ancient vein.
But every tombstone is the edge of things.
And trees—like walking canes.
Take this bouquet: transparent paper mates,
The bodies living off the ink they spend,
Amid the fictions, little clouds and shades
Over the fate you hoped to circumvent:
That of a god, one of so many gods:
Vertumnus joins Priapus, you’re the third,
In light and shade, your marbled vision blurred,
A faceless patron of the written word.
—
* Author’s note: The gravestone that interested us distinguished itself among the neighboring ones with a folder, all swollen with rainwater, full of business cards, notes, photocopies of poems and articles, a little bottle of vodka, and a toy plastic bucket full of non-refillable pens.
This tiny island bears all that passed.
The size of an Archangel’s palm, this oven
Bakes everything until it’s interwoven,
A pie where single lines try hard to last,
Just numbers, rarely letters, to be seen,
And rarer still with my tongue in accord
That darkens for me, humid as a board,
Which you’ve wiped clean.
Translated by Alexandra Berlina and Irina Shevelenko