Elegy for John Donne and Other Poems
BRODSKY, IOSIF
Poems by Iosif Brodsky Elegy for John Donne John Donne is sleeping. Everything sleeps. Walls and the floor, bedding and pictures. Rugs sleep, the table, bolts on the door, Clothes hooks,...
...Leaves of fire trembled in the darkness...
...That ridge of the nearby roof Strictly white as a tablecloth And every street cut down by sleep...
...A familiar shiver spread through him: He heard a knife sharpening a knife...
...Soundly...
...They hug the walls and corners of the past...
...In the chains of feelings and thoughts I myself have hammered against my bones...
...Now I am lying under the chill white sheet Sewn by the snow and sleep...
...How long...
...There it is changeless and crystalline The earth is no more than a sick man's dream, Here where the thought of the Lord Is like a light in the window of the last house Of the farthest place in a pea-soup fog...
...Every garden is closed with a triple lock...
...The wind is shaking the cobwebs...
...Stunted trees hug the ground...
...Only the lock—battered, unrecognizable— Fails in the courage of a new presence And resists in the gloom...
...Six Short Poems 1. Peace blankets the broken dream...
...Will he climb a tree to see If there is a light in some valley...
...In the meantime an epitaph waits to be framed: Two or three lines to the effect That a poet's tune is sensual love And spiritual love an abbot's...
...Only the centuries, rustling like leaves, Protect them in the bottomless gloom With their always opening valves...
...Or in tangled embraces...
...May 10, 1965 11 The Lord sleeps...
...Or is it that I simply hear one dog's Loud bark...
...The window Panes and the snow at them...
...A balloon hangs in the shrubbery, Two boats converse while sinking, The slippers shine in the room: The oyster's valves are untouched...
...But only silence speaks...
...The whole island sleeps...
...The top of a bare alder And the plume of a yellow birch Bend down to heal all sores And watch the tied sheaves smile At the pale, arching sky...
...Houses, backyards...
...It's you who lie alone while the dishes sleep in the cupboard While the snow descends on my sleeping house, While it flies through the darkness from here to there...
...To their holy shame they forget our sins...
...The leaping iamb, Trochees, like guards, to the left and right...
...And the sea with him And the chalky shore...
...Even the snow drives for the dark places At the very edges of the great nothing...
...Or is it you, Paul...
...But in my chains I'm pinched, I can't Pitch myself to the point Where the world is nothing more than cloud towers And rivers are like crooked lanes And this I am sentenced to Is not so everlasting after all...
...Even the patiently wakeful Devil sleeps And Hostility with him in the English field...
...There's a thought In those tears of your sad thin choir...
...Not an owl's whimper is heard...
...Ornaments, chains, posts, handles, that hook, Bolts on the doors, locks and their keys Nowhere a whisper, a rustle, a step...
...Then was it you, Gabriel, Blowing the shattering trump...
...But there is a thread between them Ordinarily called home...
...The sleeping of watchdogs, In basements cats though their ears are cocked up...
...His voice is so thin, thin as a needle As he swims against this flooding oblivion, The rime and the mist that sews night with dawn...
...Haven't we fallen too far behind Those who "straggled far behind...
...4. The creak of the carts is louder As the circling shadows thicken And the wheels roll clumsily on From the fields of Mood-stained corn...
...There it was, already a breach Between the singers and songless man (No less a breach among manikins) Because his scissors, like an open beak, Seemed a threat in that winter wood...
...And it won't be morning for hours...
...But wait...
...5. All is foreign in a house to a new tenant...
...And how is it that when I open my eyes The riders are saddling their horses And a pack of hounds are slipping their leashes To bolt from the heavenly enclosures...
...The walls contain two seas To assist the wavering mind So deeply fragmented...
...Let the old stones cry To one who lives from hand to mouth And sees and does not see through the blind eye...
...The angels...
...And the cherubim fallen, wing with wing Into sleep's wide hush . . . under Paul's high dome...
...In the distance A rumbling deafens pleasure's cutter...
...No light flashes, no wheel creaks...
...it calms the battered man Who sails in darkness along the beach...
...There is a cry, and two eyes pour...
...0 stone lodged in a sock, Bent in the flood like a swan, See the funnels in the ceiling That the night's dragnet draws...
...There is someone there in the dark...
...All forms and rhymings, the strong and the weak Inextricably one in their syllables...
...Isn't it you, Gabriel, in the starred wastes...
...Everyone's free to make the rift worse...
...Rivers of words Under the black ice of forgetfulness...
...John Donne's asleep...
...And the vision in them of Lethe's waters And another beyond it—Fame...
...No, the new man is not like the old one Who put up cupboards and set the table and thought He would keep these walls warm forever...
...2. Silence: the words are inaudible That someone is saying at the window, Hoping for netfuls of fish, a big Draw, the unshakable base of home...
...If life could truly be shared with another Then, by the same token, your death, my death...
...Sparks rose from the charcoal embers, wavering...
...If there were a space between the dense sleeping Body and waking soul, should it awake . . . I am sewn in too much into the white Packs of the hunting snow, its ceaselessness Is too much my quiescence, my present...
...Though under the hull of the sailboat Water and snow speak hoarsely To the round corners of the sky...
...And the horsemen and Gabriel with his horn...
...And winter thoughts, thoughts of a snowlaced winter, Swarmed like a lost summer's bees...
...His poems too...
...In the graves the dead, In their beds the alive in the seas of their nightshirts...
...Their scathings sleep that scourged the null And the Lord's evil servants, the Devil's minute men And only the snow rushes over dark roads, These nonillions of flakes hissing and skirling, Sifting and flying, smothering all sound...
...But it makes no sound...
...Your voice Roughened by censorious speech, Is it not you lowering your grimy head...
...Scales asleep In the fish-market...
...Nothing could join these two— Either in shape of face or character or plight...
...If I sound presumptuous, strained It is because that voice is fine, is rare...
...An axe sticks in the stair-post, a dial Keeping track of the breathless poplars...
...You were hung in them too but could vault Over the rigid slope of this roof To behold the white-scarfed seas By Cadiz and the Azores And hell's rooms you looked into, Your own and others' that you had by heart...
...They do not hear the birds But the creak of the spoke of a cart And the loud drivers' war...
...Til morning...
...And the birds...
...Sleep and more sleep in the forests and rivers With beasts, birds, the dead and the living...
...3. The stove roared...
...he departed, died...
...In a twinkling his star breaks through That has honored his sleep these ancient years...
...We shriek and sometimes eat...
...And even the anxious saints...
...A fleeting glance slips over cast-off things, Whose shadows do not suit the newcomer...
...It is a willed trap...
...The snow flies out through the darkness It fills all the miles between us By the shuttling of its small needles...
...But the house rejects the echoes of a waste...
...Every line sleeps...
...And up above there it's all sleep too...
...Everyone sleeps...
...There's a hole in this canvas, this stuff Made out of so much knitting and weaving Of the incessant opposites...
...You can't reap time or eternity...
...In stairsteps, at doors, in corners, Eyes, in papers, the table, the prepared Words of a speech, the firewood, in tongs, the Back of the fireplace where the fire has died Down, in shoes, in stockings, in shadows, Back of the mirror, in the bed, back of the chair, Again in the basin, in pots, in the sheets, In the broom at the entrance, in slippers, A crucifix...
...Are you trying to tell me from this ship of mist Return, return...
...The trees thicken, the shrubs loom larger in the night...
...Dropping from rut to rut, The carts shriek like madmen As the wheels roll from the fields Toward thicker shadows of leaves...
...He knows all vanished long ago, Two centuries ago— He wanders, thinking, through a forest of night And never hears the sound of the woodcutter's axe...
...No, here I am, your soul, John Donne, Fixed at your antipodes...
...Did you suddenly decide to quit my sleeping cathedral...
...All that English expanse—stilled...
...Crowds of books sleep...
...Wasn't it you...
...The moon burns like the fire in the stove And sets the trees on fire...
...Suddenly, instead of twittering, He felt a tremor in his shoulder blades...
...Gehenna sleeps and fire-girt Paradise...
...Good and Evil entwined...
...In the distance the hills lie gloomily in mist...
...The cross shines in the window, Surprising the simple swan...
...Many mice too...
...But listen: I'm making a fuss and disturbing your evening rest...
...The eye of the balloon is sinking...
...Rolling in the gloom of the night's Windows, with their conjuring moon, Two hills look like waves, and the shrub Near the stairs is a climbing surf...
...A star is yellowing the waters...
...All sleep, the bottle and glass, Bread, the bread-knife, dishes and basins, The little night-light, cupboards, linen, The glass of the windows, a clock...
...All things sleep...
...And that cloud— Look...
...Who's crying there...
...It's a decree, I must stay with these stones There is no way I can get close to the other thing Yes, yes, alone, tormented by the impossible hope To sew up what has been torn apart, To bring the divisions together...
...Each line a close brother though one may whisper "Move over a little" to the other...
...Those nets hung up in darkness Empty into its depths...
...All London asleep...
...6. A gardener in cottons, like a thrush, Climbed up a ladder to a leafless branch And threw a bridge of love to the birds From the world of wingless men beneath...
...And the lightfoot horses astart in their stalls In a dream they are galloping, galloping...
...The maples, the pines, the elms, firs and the spruce, The slopes of the mountain, the brooks on the slopes, Foxes, the wolf, the bear crawled to bed...
...Strange is the earth to him...
...And no matter on whose wheel you pour these waters It will grind the same coarse bread on earth...
...What is the grief that tides into a life And makes one see, instead of the park three blocks away, A dim landscape That he knows exists no more...
...Arches, Walls, wood paving blocks, big cobbled courts...
...Then worlds come swimming upward, Released to the cross in the window, Which joins them with magic threads...
...In someone's straining eye, In the gloom of the night's windows, The piece-meal sea throbs...
...The Miseries, the Afflictions, the Vices, The Prophets sleep...
...The hours interweave...
...That we may shorten this life In a nest of slumber Upon a stump, I propose We inundate our world...
...Each to his star...
...Or was it you, Great Organizer of the Universe...
...Carcasses of pigs...
...Where forests close in like walls And the rain splashes in the seldom fields Where the first woodcutter strays with his horse Lost in the pathless monotone Of the rank on rank of tree on tree in the still brown gloom...
...Only snow strikes from the night heavens Flocking, volplaning in criss-crossed directions...
...Surfacing from two voids, Two dragnets slowly rise, Hoping the cross will take them To another, nightless, field...
...Well, and here I am crying: no road...
...How long will pain flood over them, Corroding the motor of words And drawing blemishes, like pox, upon The warm, pale flesh of arms...
...Prisons asleep and castles...
...Eyes do not see, ears do not hear...
...But it is so long off, so far away Here where nothing is clear, where the dog's bark Can't be heard, nor any bell's slow moan And as he jerks his horse around To try one more pathless path out of the circle again, Suddenly the reins, the sleigh, the words, he himself And his poor horse—all seem like a biblical dream...
...do you hear—in the white darkness Someone is crying . . . or whispers in fright Someone exposed to the whole north...
...The house is a rock, and the long fence Unwinds like a fish-line in the darkness...
...And each so far from the great gates Their closeness is in all that they lack...
...There are fields that aren't furrowed by the plough...
...One comes and another, with animal malice And only sometimes from the vault of heaven A needle descends to take a stitch...
...He had to leave...
...It's you, John Donne...
...Snow chokes up the doors of their burrows...
...Separately...
...Is it you, my darling...
...All speeches sleep with their fire locked in them...
...Some bodiless witness presses Oysters in the sand...
...It hangs steadily over the boat...
...Or you out there, cherubim...
...You also caught that vivid proof of light Riding westward somewhere—I forget...
...it never was...
...Hardly...
...A bird Whistles in the shrubbery, preventing Theft...
...Rugs sleep, the table, bolts on the door, Clothes hooks, clothes, the sideboard, a candle, Curtains...
...Clutching a pillow, the hand Creeps along topless pillars, Invading clouds of smoke With its own stammering gesture...
...Everywhere, sleep...
...As the earth waits for summer I wait to return...
...It's not I who's crying...
...John Donne is sleeping in his shroud Up to his ears, full of holes...
Vol. 48 • May 1965 • No. 10
