ROMAN ELEGIES

JOSEPH BRODSKY

TWELVE POEMS DEDICATED TO BENEDETTA CRAVERI

I

The captive mahogany of a private Roman flat. In the ceiling, a dust-covered crystal island. At sunset, the smooth windowpanes flash a common ground for the nebulous and the ironed. Setting a naked foot on the rosy marble, the body steps towards its future: to its attire. If somebody shouted "Freeze!" I'd perform that marvel as this city happily did in its childhood hour The world's made of nakedness and of foldings. Still, the latter's richer with love than a face, that's certain Thus an opera tenor's so sweet to follow since he yields invariably to a curtain. By nightfall, a blue eye employs a tear, cleansing, to a needless shine, the iris, and the moon overhead apes an emptied square, with no fountain in it. But of rock as porous.

II

The month of stalled pendulums. Only a fly in August in a dry carafe's throat is droning its busy hymn. The numerals on the clock face crisscross like earnest antiaircraft searchlights probing for seraphim. The month of drawn blinds, of furniture wrapped in cotton shrouds, of the sweating double in the mirror above the cupboard, of bees that forget the topography of their hives and, coated with suntan honey, keep staggering seaward. Get busy then, faucet, over the snow-white, sagging muscle, tousle the tufts of thin gray singes! To a homeless torso and its idle, grabby mitts, there's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins. And they, in their turn, see themselves in the broken Jewish "r" no less gladly: for the pieces fallen so apart, saliva's the only solution they wish for; as Time's barbarous corneas scan the Forum.

III

The tiled, iron-hot, glowing hills: midsummer Clouds feel like angels, thanks to their cooling shadows. Thus the bold cobblestone eyes, like a happy sinner, the blue underthings of your leggy blond friend. A bard of trash, extra thoughts, broken lines, unmanly, I hide in the bowels of the Eternal City from the luminary that rolled back so many marble pupils with rays bright enough for setting up yet another universe. A yellow square. Noontime's stupor A Vespa's owner tortures the screaming gears. Clutching my chest with my hand, at a distance I count the change from the well-spent years. And, like a book at once opened to all its pages, the laurels scratch the scorched white of a balustrade. And the Colosseum looms, the skull of Argus, through whose sockets clouds drift like a thought of the vanished herd.

IV

Two young brunettes in the library of the husband of the more stunning one. Two youthful, tender ovals hunch over pages: a Muse telling Fate the substance of several things she tried to render The swish of old papet; of red crepe de Chine. A humming fan mixes violets, lavender and carnations. Braiding of hair: an elbow thrusts up its summit accustomed to cumulus-thick formations. Oh, a dark eye is obviously more fluent in brown furniture, pomegranates, oak shutters. It's more keen, it's more cordial than a blue one, to the blue one, though, nothing matters! The blue one can always tell the owner from the goods, especially before closing— that is, time from living—and turn the latter over, as tails strains to look at heads in tossing.

V

Jig, little candle tongue, over the empty paper, bow to the rotten breath as though you were courted, follow—but don't get too close!—the pauper letters standing in line to obtain the content. You animate the walls, wardrobe, the sill's sweetbriar: more than handwriting is ever after; even your soot, it appears, soars higher than the holiest wish of these musings' author Still, in their midst you earn yourself a decent name, as my fountain pen, in memory of your tender commas, in Rome, at the millennium's end, produces a lantern, a cresset, a torch, a taper never a period—and the premises look their ancient selves, from the severed head down to a yellow toenail. For an inkpot glows bright whenever someone mentions light Especially in a tunnel.

VI

Clicking of a piano at the siesta hour Stillness of sleepy mews acquires C-flats, as scales coat a fish which narrows round the corner Exhaling quarrels, inhaling a fusty noon's air, the stucco flaps its brown gills, and a sultry, porous cavity of a mouth scatters around cold pearls of Horace. I never built that cloud-thrusting stony object that could explain clouds' pallor I learned about my own, and any fate, from a letter; from its black color. Thus some fall asleep while hugging a Leica, in order to take a picture of the dream, to make themselves out, having awakened in a developed future.

VII

Eggshells of cupolas, vertebrae of bell towers. Colonnades' limbs sprawled wide in their blissful, heathen leisure. The square root of a skylark scours the bottomless, as though prior to prayers, heaven. Light reaps more than it has sown an awkward body hides in a crack while its shadow shutters walls. In these parts, all windows are looking northward where one boozes the more the less one matters. North! A white iceberg's frozen-in piano, smallpoxed with quartz, vases' granite figures, a plain unable to stop a field glass scanning, sweet Ashkenazy's ten running fingers. Never again are the legions to thread those contours: to a creaking pen, even its words won't hearken. And the golden eyebrow—as, at sunset, a cornice — rises up, and the eyes of the darling darken.

VIII

In these squinting alleyways where even a thought about one's self is too cumbersome, in this furrowed clutter of the brain which has long since refused to cloud the universe, where now keyed up, now scattered, you trundle your boots on the cobbled, checkered squares, from a fountain and back to a Caesar— thus a needle shuffles across the record missing its grooves—it is altogether proper to settle now for a measly fraction of remaining life, for the past life's craving completeness, for its attempts to fashion an integer The sound the heels are scraping from the ground is the aria of their union, a serenade that what has been longer hums to what's to be shorter This is a genuine Caruso for a gramophone-dodging mongrel.

IX

Lesbia, Julia, Cynthia, Livia, Michelina. Bosoms, ringlets of fleece: for effects, and for causes also. Heaven-baked clay, fingertips' brave arena. Flesh that renders eternity an anonymous torso You breed immortals: those who have seen you bare, they too became Catulluses, statues, heavy Neros, etcetera. Short-term goddesses! you are much more joy to believe in than a permanent bevy. Hail the smooth abdomen, thighs as their hamstrings tighten. White upon white, as Kazimir's* dream image, one summer evening, 1, the most mortal item in the midst of this wreckage resembling the whole world's rib cage, sip with feverish lips wine from a tender collarbone, the sky is as pale as a cheek with a mole that trembles, and cupolas bulge upward like the tits of the she-wolf, fallen asleep after having fed her Romulus and her Remus.

*The painter Kazimir Malevich

X

Mimicking local pines, embrace the ether! The fingertips won't cull much more than the pane's tulle quiver Still, a little black bird won't return from the sky blue, either And we too aren't gods in miniature, that's clear That's precisely why we are happy: because we are nothings, speckled pores are spurned by summits or by sharp horizons, the body is space's reversal no matter how hard you pedal. And when we are unhappy, it's perhaps for the same small reasons. Better lean on a portico, loose the white shirt that billows, stone cools the spinal column, gray pigeons mutter, and watch how the sun is sinking into gardens and distant villas, how the water—the tutor of eloquence—pours from the rusted lips repeating not a thing, save a nymph with her marble truants, save that it's cold and fresh, save that it's splitting the face into fluid ruins.

XI

Private life. Fears, shredded thoughts, the jagged blanket renders the contours of Europe meager By means of a blue shirt and a rumpled jacket something still gets reflected in the wardrobe mirror Let's have some tea, face, so that the teeth may winnow lips. Yoked by a ceiling, the air grows flatter Cast inadvertently through the window, a glance makes a bunch of bluejays flutter off from their pine tops. A room in Rome, white paper, the tail of a freshly drawn letter: a darting rodent. Thus, thanks to the perfect perspective, some objects peter out, thus still others shuffle across the frozen Tanais,* dropping from the picture, limping, occiputs covered with wilted laurels and blizzards' powder— towards Time, lying beyond the limits of every spraddling superpower

*The river Don, mentioned by Ovid in his Tristia

XII

Lean over. I'll whisper something to you: I am grateful for everything: for the chicken cartilage and for the chirr of scissors already cutting out the void for me—for it is your hem. Doesn't matter if it's pitch-black, doesn't matter if it holds nothing: no ovals, no limbs to count. The more invisible something is, the more certain it's been around, and the more obviously it's everywhere. You were the first to whom all this happened, were you? For a nail holding something one would divide by two — were it not for remainders—there is no gentler quarry. I was in Rome. I was flooded by light. The way a splinter can only dream about. Golden coins on the retina are to stay— enough to last one through the whole blackout

TRANSLATED BY THE AUTHOR