Dust is the flesh of time

 

 

 

Death will come, and she will have your eyes.

                 Cesare Pavese

Nature Morte

People and things crowd in.
Eyes can be bruised and hurt,
by people as well as things.
It is better to live in the dark.
I sit on a bench in the park,
watching the passers-by,
sometimes whole families.
I am fed up with the light. 
It's January, winter time,
in accordance with the calendar.
When I have had enough of the dark,
then I shall begin to speak.

It's time, I shall now begin.
It makes no difference with what.
Open mouth. It's better to speak.
What then shall I talk about?
The day? The night?
Shall I talk about nothingness?
Or about things?
About things, not people. They will die.
Everything.
I, too, will die.
All talk is barren trade,
a writing on the wind's wall.

My blood is very cold. Its cold is more withering
than iced-to-the-bottom streams.
People are not my thing, I hate the look of them.
Their faces grafted with a lifelong look.
There is something in their faces
that is contrary to the mind.
A sign of flattery,
God only knows for whom.

Things are more pleasant.
Their outsides are neither good nor evil.
And, if penetrated,
nor are their insides good or evil.
The Dust.
Dust, a wood borer.
Thin walls and brittle moth-wings.
Uncomfortable to the hand.
Dust.
When you switch lights on,
there's nothing but dust to see.
That's true even if the thing
is sealed up hermetically.

The old cabinet, 
the outside as well as the inside,
strangely reminds me of the Notre Dame de Paris.
Everything is dark within it.
Dust mop or bishop's stole
cannot touch the dust of things.
Usually things themselves
don't try to purge the dusk of their own,
do not even raise an eyebrow for dust.
Dust is the flesh of time;
time's very flesh and blood.

Lately I often sleep during daytime.
Apparently my death is trying me.
Holds, though I breathe, a mirror for my mouth.
Seeing if I can stand not being in daylight.
I'm moving, my two hips are as cold as ice.
Blue veins give a marble skin.

As a surprise to us,
summing their angles up,
things drop away from man's world,
a world made with words.
Things do not move. That's our delirium.
Each thing is a space,
beyond which there can be no thing.
A thing can be battered, burned,
gutted, broken up, thrown out.
And yet the thing will never yell: "Oh fuck!"

A tree. Its shadow, and earth,
pierced by clinging roots.
Interlaced monograms.
Clay and a clutch of rocks.
Roots interweave and blend.
Stones have their private mass which frees them
from the bond of normal rootedness.
This stone is fixed.
One can't move it or heave it out.
Shadow.
The tree shadows catch a man,
just like a fish in their net. 

A thing, its brown color. Its blurry outline.
Twilight. 
Now left only: nothingness.
A nature morte.
Death will come and find a body whose silent peace
reflects death's approach
like the arrival of a woman.
An absurd pack of lies:
skull, skeleton, scythe.
Rather, "Death will come,
and she will have your eyes."

Mary now speaks to Christ
- Are you my son? Or god?
You are nailed to the cross.
Where lies my homeward road?
Can I pass through my gate without understanding,
without deciding: are you my son or god?
That is: dead or alive?
Christ speaks to her in turn:
- Whether dead or alive,
woman, it's all the same
son or god, I am thine.


Joseph Brodsky

Translation by George Kline

Fear of poets

Russia has been a conspicuous executioner of its poets. How few of the great poets of the Soviet Union were allowed to die peacefully in their beds—honored, serene, and undisturbed! Few died in bed, and none in peace.

Nikolai Gumilev faced a firing squad. Vladimir Mayakovsky and Marina Tsvetaeva took their own lives. Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak died quietly, but certainly not without harassment. Osip Mandelstam perished in a Gulag labor camp—the same fate that later befell the renowned Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus. In those camps, countless gifted individuals were driven to madness, executed, or worn down by sheer exhaustion.

It seems that human life has never held much value in this still brutally repressive country.

Joseph Brodsky, however, was fortunate. In June 1972, rather than confining him to a psychiatric institution, Soviet authorities did put him on a plane to Vienna. After a brief stay in Austria, he moved to the United States. In 1987, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Brodsky died in 1996 at the age of 55, in his home in New York. He never returned to Russia.

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https://maykhoentan.blogspot.com/2020/01/joseph-brodsky-dichter_25.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guN3OIE0FDI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXS2suzvKNk