Read Time < 1 mins You’ve climbed the mountain. At its top, the mountain and the climbing stop. A peak is where the climber finds his biggest step is not mankind’s. Proud of your stamina and craft you stand there being photographed transfixed between nowhere-to-go and us who give you vertigo. Well, strike your tent and have your lunch […]
To The President Elect – Joseph Brodsky Read More »
Read Time < 1 mins You know, I try, when darkness falls, to estimate to some degree — by marking off the grief in miles — the distance now from you to me. And all the figures change to words: confusion, which begins at A, and hope, which starts at B, move towards a terminus (you) far away. Two
For School Children – Joseph Brodsky Read More »
Read Time < 1 mins A list of some observation. In a corner, it’s warm. A glance leaves an imprint on anything it’s dwelt on. Water is glass’s most public form. Man is more frightening than its skeleton. A nowhere winter evening with wine. A black porch resists an osier’s stiff assaults. Fixed on an elbow, the body bulks
A List of Some Observation – Joseph Brodsky Read More »
Read Time < 1 mins All the huskies are eaten. There is no space left in the diary, And the beads of quick words scatter over his spouse’s sepia-shaded face adding the date in question like a mole to her lovely cheek. Next, the snapshot of his sister. He doesn’t spare his kin: what’s been reached is the
A Polar Explorer – Joseph Brodsky Read More »
Read Time < 1 mins Twice I awoke this night, and went to the window. The street-lamps were a fragment of a sentence spoken in sleep, leading to nothing, like omission points, affording me no comfort and no cheer. I dreamt of you, with child, and now, having lived so many years apart from you, experienced my guilt, and
Love – Joseph Brodsky Read More »
Read Time < 1 mins All his life he was building something, inventing something. Now, for a Cretan queen, an artificial heifer, so as to cuckold the king. Then a labyrinth, the time for the king himself, to hide from bewildered glances an unbearable offspring. Or a flying contraption, when the king figured himself so busy with new commissions.
Daedalus in Sicily – Joseph Brodsky Narrated Read More »
Read Time < 1 mins Here’s a girl from a dangerous town She crops her dark hair short so that less of her has to frown when someone gets hurt. She folds her memories like a parachute. Dropped, she collects the peat and cooks her veggies at home: they shoot here where they eat. Ah, there’s more sky in
Belfast Tune – Joseph Brodsky Read More »
Read Time < 1 mins The stone-built villages of England.A cathedral bottled in a pub window.Cows dispersed across fields.Monuments to kings. A man in a moth-eaten suitsees a train off, heading, like everything here, for the sea,smiles at his daughter, leaving for the East.A whistle blows. And the endless sky over the tilesgrows bluer as swelling birdsong fills.And the
Stone Villages – Joseph Brodsky Narrated Read More »
Read Time < 1 mins A hotel in whose ledgers departures are more prominent than arrivals.With wet Koh-i-noors the October rainstrokes what’s left of the naked brain.In this country laid flat for the sake of rivers,beer smells of Germany and the seagulls arein the air like a page’s soiled corners.Morning enters the premises with a coroner’spunctuality, puts its earto
Dutch Mistress – Joseph Brodsky Narrated Read More »
Read Time < 1 mins In such an inexplicable blue, Upon the stonework to embark, The little ship of glowing hue Appears in Alexander Park. The little lamp, a yellow rose, Arising — ready to retreat — Above the people it adores; Near strangers’ feet. In such an inexplicable blue The drunkards’ hive, the loonies’ team. A
Moscow Carol – Joseph Brodsky Narrated Read More »
