Subject: Brodsky

Please note: born in May,
in a damp city (hence the motif: water),
soon to be surrounded by an army
whose officers kept Hölderlin
in their backpacks, but alas, they had
no time for reading. Too much to do.

Tone – sardonic, despair – authentic.
Always en route, from Mexico to Venice,
lover and crusader, who campaigned
ceaselessly for his unlikely party
(name: Poetry versus the Infinite,
or PVI, if you prefer abbreviations).

In every city and in every port
he had his agents; he sometimes sang his poems
before an avid crowd that didn’t catch
a word. Afterwards, exhausted, he’d smoke a Gauloise
on a cement embankment, gulls circling overhead,
as if above the Baltic, back home.

Vast intelligence. Favorite topic: time
versus thought, which chases phantoms,
revives Mary Stuart, Daedalus, Tiberius.
Poetry should be like horseracing;
wild horses, with jockeys made of marble,
an unseen finish line lies hidden in the clouds.

Please remember: irony and pain;
the pain had lived long inside his heart
and kept on growing – as though
each elegy he wrote adored him
obsessively and wanted
him alone to be its hero –

but ladies and gentlemen – your patience,
please, we’re nearly through – I don’t know
quite how to put it; something like tenderness,
the almost timid smile,
the momentary doubt, the hesitation,
the tiny pause in flawless arguments.