Joseph Brodsky - Lullaby of Cape Cod

For A.B.

I
The eastern tip of the Empire dives into night;
cicadas fall silent over some empty lawn;
on classic pediments inscriptions dim from the sight
as a final cross darkens and then is gone
like the nearly empty bottle on the table.
From the empty street’s patrol car a refrain
of Ray Charles’s keyboard tinkles away like rain.

Crawling to a vacant beach from the vast wet
of ocean, a crab digs into sand laced with sea lather
and sleeps. A giant clock on a brick tower
rattles its scissors. The face is drenched with sweat.
The streetlamps glisten in the stifling weather,
formally spaced,
like white shirt buttons open to the waist.

It’s stifling. The eye’s guided by a blinking stoplight
in its journey to the whiskey across the room
on the nightstand. The heart stops dead a moment, but its dull boom
goes on, and the blood, on pilgrimage gone forth,
comes back to a crossroad. The body, like an upright,
rolled-up road map, lifts an eyebrow in the North.

It’s strange to think of surviving, but that’s what happened.
Dust settles on furnishings, and a car bends length
around corners in spite of Euclid. And the deepened
darkness makes up for the absence of people, of voices,
and so forth, and alters them, by its cunning and strength,
not to deserters, to ones who have taken flight,
but rather to those now disappeared from sight.

It’s stifling. And the thick leaves’ rasping sound
is enough all by itself to make you sweat.
What seems to be a small dot in the dark
could only be one thing – a star. On the deserted ground
of a basketball court a vagrant bird has set
its fragile egg in the steel hoop’s raveled net.
There’s a smell of mint now, and of mignonette.

II
Like a despotic Sheik, who can be untrue
to his vast seraglio and multiple desires
only with a harem altogether new,
varied, and numerous, I have switched Empires.
A step dictated by the acrid, live
odor of burning carried on the air
from all four quarters ( a time for silent prayer!)
and, from the crow’s high vantage point, from five.

Like a snake charmer, like the Pied Piper of old,
playing my flute I passed the green janissaries,
my testes sensing their poleaxe’s sinister cold,
as when one wades into water. And then with the brine
of seawater sharpness filling, flooding the mouth,
I crossed the line

and sailed into muttony clouds. Below me curled
serpentine rivers, roads bloomed with dust, ricks yellowed,
and everywhere in that diminished world,
in formal opposition, near and far,
lined up like print in a book about to close,
armies rehearsed their games in balanced rows
and cities all went dark as caviar.

And then the darkness thickened. All lights fled,
a turbine droned, a head ached rhytmically,
and space backed up like a crab, time surged ahead
into first place and, streaming westwardly,
seemed to be heading home, void of all light,
soiling its garments with the tar of night.

I fell asleep. When I awoke to the day,
magnetic north had strengthened its deadly pull.
I beheld new heavens, I beheld the earth made new.
It lay turning to dust, as flat things always do.

III
Being itself the essence of all things,
solitude teaches essentials. How gratefully the skin
receives the leathery coolness of its chair.
Meanwhile, my arm, off in the dark somewhere,
goes wooden in sympathetic brotherhood
with the chair’s listless arm of oaken wood.
A glowing oaken grain
cover the tiny bones of the joints. And the brain
knocks like the glass’s ice cube tinkling.

It’s stifling. On a pool hall’s steps, in a dim glow,
somebody striking a match rescues his face
of an old black man from the enfolding dark
for a flaring moment. The whithe-toothed portico
of the District Courthouse sinks in the thickened lace
of foliage, and awaits the random search
of passing headlights. High up on its perch,

like the fiery warning at Balthazar’s Feast,
the inscription Coca-Cola hums in red.
In the Country Club’s unweeded flower bed
a fountain whispers its secrets. Unable to rouse
a simple tirralirra in these dull boughs,
a strengthless breeze rustles the tattered, creased
news of the world, its obsolete events,
against an improvised, unlikely fence

of iron bedsteads. It’s stifling. Leaning on his rifle,
the Unknown Soldier grows even more unknown.
Against a concrete jetty, in dull repose
a trawler scrapes the rusty bridge of its nose.
A weary, buzzing ventilator mills
the U.S.A.’s hot air with metal gills.

Like a carried-over number in addition,
the sea comes up in the dark
and on the beach it leaves its delible mark,
and the unvarying, diastolic motion,
the repetitious, drugged sway of the ocean,
cradles a splinter adrift for a million years.
If you step sideways off the pier’s
edge, you’ll continue to fall toward those tides
for a long, long time, your hand stiff at your sides,
but you will make no splash.

IV
The change of Empires is intimately tied
to the hum of words, the soft, fricative spray
of spittle in the act of speech, the whole
sum of Lobachevsky’s angles, the strange way
that parallels may unwittingly collide
by casual chance someday
as longitudes contrive to meet at the pole.

And the change is linked as well to the chopping of wood,
to the tattered lining of life turned inside out
and thereby changed to a garment dry and good
(to tweed in winter, linnen in a heat spell),
and the brain’s kernel hardening in its shell.

In general, of all our organs the eye
alone retains its elasticity,
pliant, adaptive as a dream or wish.
For the change of Empires is linked with far-flung sight,
with the long gaze cast across the ocean’s tide
(somewhere within us lives a dormant fish),
and the mirror’s revelation that the part in your hair
that you meticulously placed on the left side
mysteriously shows up on the right,

linked to weak gums, to heartburn brought about
by a diet unfamiliar and alien,
to the intense blankness, to the pristine white
of the mind, which corresponds to the plain, small
blank page of letter paper on which you write.
But now the giddy pen
points out resemblances, for after all

the device in your hand is the same old pen and ink
as before, the woodland plants exhibit no change
of leafage, and the same old bombers range
the clouds toward who knows what
precisely chosen, carefully targeted spot.
And what you really need now is a drink.

V
New England towns seem much as if they were cast
ashore along its coastline, beached by a flood
tide, and shining in darkness mile after mile
with imbricate, speckled scales of shingle and tile,
like schools of sleeping fish hauled in by the vast
nets of a continent that was first discovered
by herring and by cod.

But neither cod nor herring have had any noble statues raised
in their honor, even though the memorial date
could be comfortably omitted. As for the great
flag of the place, it bears no blazon or mark
of the first fish-founder among its parallel bars,
and as Louis Sullivan might perhaps have said,
seen in the dark,
it looks like a sketch of towers thrust among stars.

Stifling. A man on his porch has wound a towel
around his troath. A pitifull, small moth
batters the window screen and bounces off
like a bullet that Nature has zeroed in on itself
from an invisible ambush,
aiming for some improbable bull’s-eye
right smack in the middle of July.

Because watches keep ticking, pain washes away
with the years. If time picks up the knack
of panacea, it’s because time can’t abide
being rushed, of finally turns insomniac.
And walking or swimming, the dreams of one hemisphere (heads)
swarm with the nightmares, the dark, sinister play
of its opposite (tails), its double, its underside.

Stifling. Great motionless plants. A distant bark.
A nodding head now jerks itself upright
to keep faces and phone numbers from sliding into the dark
and off the precarious edge of memory.
In genuine tragedy
it’s not the fine hero that finally dies, it seems,
but, from constant wear and tear, night after night,
the old stage set itself, giving way at the seams.

VI
Since it’s too late by now to say goodbye
and expect from time and space any reply
except an echo that sounds like “Here’s your tip”,
pseudo-majestic, cubing every chance
word that escapes the lip,
I write in a sort of trance,

I write these words out blindly, the scrivening hand
attempting to outstrip
by a second the “How come?”
that at any moment might escape the lip,
the same lip of the writer,
and sail away into night, there to expand
by geometrical progress, und so weiter.

I write from an Empire whose enormous flanks
extend beneath the sea. Having sampled two
oceans as well as continents, I feel that I know
what the globe itself must feel: there’s nowhere to go.
Elsewhere is nothing more than a far-flung strew
of stars, burning away.

Better to use a telescope to see
a snail self-sealed to the underside of a leaf.
I always used to regard “infinity”
as the art of splitting a liter into three
equal components with a couple of friends
without a drop left over. Not, through a lens,
an aggregate of miles without relief.

Night. A cuckoo wheezes in the Waldorf-
Inglorious. The legions close their ranks
and, leaning against cohorts, sleep upright.
Circuses pile against fora. High in the night
above the bare blueprint of an empty court,
like a lost tennis ball, the moon regards its court,
a chess queen’s dream, spare, parqueted, formal and bright.
There’s no life without furniture.

VII
Only a corner cordoned off and laced
by dusty cobwebs may properly be called
right-angled; only after the musketry of applause
and bravos does the actor rise from the dead;
only when the fulcrum is solidly placed
can a person lift, by Archimedean laws,
the weight of this world. And only that body whose weight
is balanced at right angles to the floor
can manage to walk about and navigate.

Stifling. There’s a cockroach mob in the stadium
of the zinc washbasin, crowding around the old
corpse of a dried-up sponge. Turning its crown,
a bronze faucet, like Caesar’s laureled head,
deposes upon the living and the dead
a merciless column of water in which they drown.

The little bubble beads inside my glass
look like the holes in cheese.
No doubt that gravity holds sway,
just as upon a solid mass,
over such small transparencies as these.
And its accelerating waterfall
(thirty-two feet per sec per sec) refracts
as does a ray of light in human clay.

Only the stacked white china on the stove
could look so much like a squashed, collapsed pagoda.
Space lends itself just to repeatable things,
roses, for instance. If you see one alone,
you instantly see two. The bright corona,
the crimson petals abuzz, acrawl with wings
of dragonflies, of wasps and bees with stings.

Stifling. Even the shadow on the wall,
servile and weak as it is, still mimics the rise
of the hand that wipes the forehead’s sweat. The smell
of old body is even clearer now
than body’s outline. Thought loses its defined
edges; and the frazzled mind
goes soft in its soup-bone skull. No one is here
to set the proper focus of your eyes.

VIII
Preserve these words against a time of cold,
a day of fear: man survives like a fish,
stranded, beached, but intent
on adapting itself to some deep, cellular wish,
wriggling toward bushes, forming hinged leg-struts, then
to depart (leaving a track like the scrawl of a pen)
for the interior, the heart of the continent.

Full-breasted sphinxes there are, and lions winged
like fanged and mythic birds.
Angels in white, as well, and nymphs of the sea.
To one who shoulders the vast obscurity
of darkness and heavy heat (may one add, grief?)
they are more cherished than the concentric, ringed
zeros that ripple outward from dropped words.

Even space itself, where there’s nowhere to sit down,
declines, like a star in its ether, its cold sky.
Yet just because shoes exist and the foot is shod
some surface will always be there, some place to stand,
a portion of dry land.
And its brinks and beaches will be enchanted by
the soft song of the cod:

“Time is far greater than space. Space is a thing.
Whereas time is, in essence, the thought, the conscious dream
of a thing. And life itself is a variety
of time. The carp and bream
are its clots and distillates. As are even more stark
and elemental things, including the sea
wave and the firmament of the dry land.
Including death, that punctuation mark.

At times, in that chaos, that piling up of days,
the sound of a single word rings in the ear,
some brief, syllabic cry,
like ‘love’, perhaps, or possibly merely ‘hi!’
But before I can make it out, static or haze
trouble the scanning lines that undulate
and wave like the loosened ripples of your hair.”

IX
Man broods over his life like night above a lamp.
At certain moments a thought takes leave of one
of the brain’s hemisphere, and slips, as a bedsheet might,
from under the restless sleeper’s body clamp,
revealing who-knows-what-under-the-sun.
Unquestionably, night

is a bulky thing, but not so infinite
as to engross both lobes. By slow degrees
the Africa of the brain, its Europe, the Asian mass of it,
as well as other prominences in its crowded seas,
creaking on their axis, turn a wrinkeld cheek
toward the electric heron with its lightbulb of a beak.

Behold: Aladdin says “Sesame!” and presto! there’s a golden trove.
Caesar calls for his Brutus down the dark forum’s colonnades.
In the jade pavilion a nightingale serenades
the Mandarin on the delicate theme of love.
A young girl rocks a cradle in the lamp’s arena of light.
A naked Papuan leg keeps up a boogie-woogie beat.

Stifling. And so, cold knees tucked snug against the night,
it comes to you all at once, there in the bed,
that this is marriage. That beyond the customs sheds
across dozens of borders there turns upon its side
a body you now share nothing with, unless
it be the ocean’s bottom, hidden from sight,
and the experience of nakedness.

Nevertheless, you won’t get up together.
Because, while it may be light way over there,
the dark still governs in your hemisphere.
One solar source has never been enough
to serve two average bodies, not since the time
God glued the world together in its prime.
The light has never been enough.

X
I notice a sleeve’s hem, as my eyes fall,
and an elbow bending itself. Coordinates show
my location as paradise, that sovereign, blessed
place where all purpose and longing is set at rest.
This is a planet without vistas, with no
converging lines, with no prospects at all.

Touch the table corner, touch the sharp rib of the pen
with your fingertip: you can tell such things could hurt.
And yet the paradise of the inert
resides in pointedness;
whereas in the lives of men
it is fleeting, a misty, mutable excess
that will not come again.

I find myself, as it were, on a mountain peak.
Beyond me there is… Chronos and thin air.
Preserve these words. The paradise men seek
is a dead end, a worn-out, battered cape
bent into crooked shape,
a cone, a finial cap, a steel ship’s bow
from which the lookout never shouts, “Land ho!”

All you can tell for certain is the time.
That said, there’s nothing left but to police
the revolving hands. The eye drowns silently
in the clockface as in a broad, bottomless sea.
In paradise all clocks refuse to chime
for fear they might, in striking, disturb the peace.

Double all absences, multiply by two
whatever’s missing, and you’ll have some clue
to what it’s like here. A number, in any case,
is also a word and, as such, a device
or gesture that melts away without a trace,
like a small cube of ice.

XI
Great issues leave a trail of words behind,
free-form as clouds of treetops, rigids as dates
of the year. So, too, decked out in a paper hat,
the body viewing the ocean. It is selfless, flat
as a mirror as it stands in the darkness there.
Upon its face, just as within its mind,
nothing but spreading ripples anywhere.

Consisting of love, of dirty words, a blend
of ashes, the fear of death, the fragile case
of the bone, and the groin’s jeopardy, an erect
body at seaside is the foreskin of space,
letting semen through. His cheek tear-silver-flecked,
man juts forth into Time; man is his own end.

The eastern end of the Empire dives into night-
throat-high in darkness. The coil of the inner ear,
like a snail’s helix, faithfully repeats
spirals of words in which it seems to hear
a voice of its own, and this tends to incite
the vocal cords, but it doesn’t help you see.
In the realm of Time, no precipice creates
an echo’s formal, answering symmetry.

Stifling. Only when lying flat on your back
can you launch, with a sigh, your dry speech toward those mute,
infinite regions above. With a soft sigh.
But the thought of the land’s vastness, your own minute
size in comparison, swings you forth and back
from wall to wall, like a cradle’s rockabye.

Therefore, sleep well. Sweet dreams. Knit up that sleeve.
Sleep as those only do who have gone pee-pee.
Countries get snared in maps, never shake free
of their net of latitudes. Don’t ask who’s there
if you think the door is creaking. Never believe
the person who might reply and claim he’s there.

XII
The door is creaking. A cod stands at the sill.
He asks for a drink, naturally, for God’s sake.
You can’t refuse a traveler a nip.
You indicate to him which road to take,
a winding highway, and wish him a good trip.
He takes his leave, but his identical

twin has got a salesman’s foot in the door.
(The two fish are as duplicate as glasses.)
All night a school of them come visiting.
But people who make their homes along the shore
know how to sleep, have learned how to ignore
the measured tread of these approaching masses.

Sleep. The land beyond you is not round.
It is merely long, with various dip and mound,
its ups and downs. Far longer is the sea.
At times, like a wrinkled forehead, it displays
a rolling wave. And longer still than these
is the strand of matching beads of countless days;

and nights; and beyond these, the blindfold mist,
angels in paradise, demons down in hell.
And longer a hundredfold than all of this
are the thoughts of life, the solitary thought
of death. And ten times that, longer than all,
the queer, vertiginous thought of Nothingness.

But the eye can’t see that far. In fact, it must
close down its lid to catch a glimpse of things.
Only this way – in sleep – can the eye adjust
to proper vision. Whatever may be in store,
for good or ill, in the dreams that such sleep brings
depends on the sleeper. A cod stands at the door.