ON LOVE


Twice I woke up tonight and wandered to

the window. And the lights down on the street,
like pale omission points, tried to complete
the fragment of a sentence spoken through
sleep, but diminished darkness, too.

I'd dreamt that you were pregnant, and in spite
of having lived so many years apart
I still felt guilty and my heartened palm
caressed your belly as, by the bedside,
it fumbled for my trousers and the light­-

switch on the wall. And with the bulb turned on
I knew that I was leaving you alone
there, in the darkness, in the dream, where calmly
you waited till I might return,
not trying to reproach or scold me

for the unnatural hiatus. For

darkness restores what light cannot repair.
There we are married, blest, we make once more
the two-backed beast and children are the fair
excuse of what we're naked for.

Some future night you will appear again.

You'll come to me, worn out and thin now, after
things in between, and I'll see son or daughter
not named as yet. This time I will restrain
my hand from groping for the switch, afraid

and feeling that I have no right

to leave you both like shadows by that sever­-
ing fence of days that bar your sight,
voiceless, negated by the real light
that keeps me unattainable forever.

Translated by Daniel Weissbort with the author

****

Odysseus to Telemachus


My dear Telemachus,

The Trojan War

is over now; I don't recall who won it.

The Greeks, no doubt, for only they would leave
so many dead so far from their own homeland.

But still, my homeward way has proved too long.
While we were wasting time there, old Poseidon,
it almost seems, stretched and extended space.

I don't know where I am or what this place

can be. It would appear some filthy island,

with bushes, buildings, and great grunting pigs.

A garden choked with weeds; some queen or other.
Grass and huge stones . . . Telemachus, my son!
To a wanderer the faces of all islands
resemble one another. And the mind

trips, numbering waves; eyes, sore from sea horizons,
run; and the flesh of water stuffs the ears.
I can't remember how the war came out;
even how old you are-I can't remember.

Grow up, then, my Telemachus, grow strong.
Only the gods know if we'll see each other
again. You've long since ceased to be that babe
before whom I reined in the plowing bullocks.
Had it not been for Palamedes trick
we two would still be living in one household.
But maybe he was right; away from me
you are quite safe from all Oedipal passions,

and your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless.

Translated by George L. Kline

Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad on May 24, 1940. He left school at the age of fifteen but taught himself English and Polish and began writing poetry. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972 after serving 18 months of a five-year sentence in a labor camp in northern Russia. Before leaving the Soviet Union, Brodsky studied with the beloved Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. After his exile, he moved to the USA.  Brodsky authored nine volumes of poetry, as well as  collections of seáis. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. His first book of poetry in English translation appeared in 1973. Poetry publications (a selection):  A Part of Speech (1980), Collected Poems in English (2000), Elegy for John Donne and Other Poems (1967)Selected Poems (1992), So Forth (1996).