#joesph brodsky

[whatreallyhappenedinbudapest]

"and your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless."

[burnsbabblebooks]

“Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse

— Joesph Brodsky

[letstalkbooktalk-blog]

“There are worst crimes than burning books.  One of them is not reading them.” ~Joesph Brodsky 

[poetrysupportgroup]

Joseph Brodsky in Venice (1981)

by Campbell McGrath La Serenissima, in morning light, is beautiful.  But you already knew that.  Palette of honeyed ochre and ship's bell bronze,  water precisely the color of the hand-ground pigment  with which the water of Venice has been painted for centuries,  angled slats of aquamarine chopped by wakes to agate,  matte black backlit with raw opal  and anodized aluminum, rope-work of wisteria, wands  of oleander emerging from hidden gardens. At noon,  near the boat-yard of the last gondola maker, a violin echoes from deep inside an empty cistern.  Lo and behold. Ecco.  A swirl of wind-blown ashes from yet another cigarette  and for a moment you see December snow  in Saint Petersburg, the Lion's Bridge, crystalline halo crowning Akhmatova's defiant silhouette.  Sunset: bitter orange and almond milk,  sepia retinting the canals with cartographer's ink  as you study the small gray lagoon crabs  patrolling a kingdom of marble slabs  descending into the depths; rising almost imperceptibly,  the tide licks at, kisses, then barely spills  across the top step's foot-worn, weed-velveted lip  in slippery caravans, dust-laden rivulets.  So another day's cargo of terrestrial grit  enriches their scuttled realm,  and they make haste, like drunken pirates in a silent film, erratically but steadfastly, to claim it. ____________________ About this poem: "On a visit to Venice a few summers ago, I happened upon a historical marker noting that Joseph Brodsky had lived for a time in a certain palazzo. Brodsky had been my teacher at Columbia back in the 1980s, and the image of him smoking his cigarette with Russian intensity amidst Venice's shopworn beauty seemed at first paradoxical, and then strangely logical. And so I simply imagined him into being, watching the lagoon crabs go about their business. Given his rigorous poetics, it seemed impossible to write a poem about Brodsky without some formal component, and haphazard rhyme was the least I could do. Let me add, as a postscript, that conceiving this poem brought to my attention Brodsky's own memoir of Venice, Watermark, a slender, lyrical, deeply delightful book."