«Человек, первым открывший Бродского Западу». Беседы с Джорджем Клайном

Perhaps a landscape smokesamong your ashes,and with thick reading glassesI’ll scan its slopes —its beaches, dancers, nymphs.Is it as bright asthe day, or dark as night is?And could one glimpse —ascending that sky’s screen —some blazing lantern?And tell me, please, what patterninspired this scene?

VI

It seems to me you area protean creature,whose markings mask a featureof face, or stone, or star.Who was the jeweler,brow uncontracted,who from our world extracted

your miniature —a world where madness bringsus low, and lower,where we are things, while you arethe thought of things?

VII

Why were these lovely shapesand colors givenfor your one day of life inthis land of lakes?– a land whose dappled mir-rors have one merit:reflecting space, they store it.Such brief existence toreaway your chanceto be captured, delivered,within cupped hands to quiver —the hunter’s eye entrance.

VIII

You shun every response —but not from shyness

or wickedness or slyness,and not becauseyou’re dead. Dead or alive,to God’s least creatureis given voice for speech, orfor song – a signthat it has found a wayto bind together,and stretch life’s limits, whetheran hour or day.

IX

But you lack even this:the means to uttera word. Yet, probe the matter;it’s better thus.You’re not in heaven’s debt,on heaven’s ledger.It’s not a curse, I pledge you,that your small weightand span rob you of tongue.

Sound’s burden, too, is grievous.And you’re more speechless,less fleshed, than time.

X

Living too brief an hourfor fear or trembling,you spin, motelike, ascendingabove this bed of flowers,beyond the prison spacewhere past and futurecombine to break, or batter,our lives, and thuswhen your path leads you farto open meadows,your pulsing wings bring shadowsand shapes to air.

XI

So, too, the sliding penwhich inks a surfacehas no sense of the purposeof any line

or that the whole will endas an amalgamof heresy and wisdom;it therefore trusts the handwhose silent speech incitesfingers to throbbing —whose spasm reaps no pollen,but eases hearts.

XII

Such beauty, set besideso brief a season,suggests to our stunned reasonthis bleak surmise:the world was made to holdno end or telos,and if – as some would tell us —there is a goal,it’s not ourselves.No butterfly collectorcan trap light or detect wherethe darkness dwells.

XIII