Joseph Brodsky

­Joseph Brodsky is considered one of the greatest poets to have ever lived.

In his works, he shared his life with the reader – how he went to prison for his beliefs, how he loved two women (one who betrayed him for his friend), how his heart was breaking from a long separation with his son, how he was exiled from Russia and later became a Nobel Laureate.

Darling, you think it's love…

Darling, you think it's love, it's just a midnight journey.

Best are the dales and rivers removed by force,

as from the next compartment throttles "Oh, stop it, Bernie,"

yet the rhythm of those paroxysms is exactly yours.

Hook to the meat! Brush to the red-brick dentures,

alias cigars, smokeless like a driven nail!

Here the works are fewer than monkey wrenches,

and the phones are whining, dwarfed by to-no-avail.

Bark, then, with joy at Clancy, Fitzgibbon, Miller.

Dogs and block letters care how misfortune spells.

Still, you can tell yourself in the john by the spat-at mirror,

slamming the flush and emerging with clean lapels.

Only the liquid furniture cradles the dwindling figure.

Man shouldn't grow in size once he's been portrayed.

Look: what's been left behind is about as meageras

what remains ahead. Hence the horizon's blade.

Elegy

About a year has passed. I've returned to the place of the battle,

to its birds that have learned their unfolding of wings

from a subtle

lift of a surprised eyebrow, or perhaps from a razor blade-

wings, now the shade of early twilight, now of state

bad blood.

Now the place is abuzz with trading

in your ankles's remanants, bronzes

of sunburnt breastplates, dying laughter, bruises,

rumors of fresh reserves, memories of high treason,

laundered banners with imprints of the many

who since have risen.

All's overgrown with people. A ruin's a rather stubborn

architectural style. And the hearts's distinction

from a pitch-black cavern

isn't that great; not great enough to fear

that we may collide again like blind eggs somewhere.

At sunrise, when nobody stares at one's face, I often,

set out on foot to a monument cast in molten

lengthy bad dreams. And it says on the plinth "commander

in chief." But it reads "in grief," or "in brief,"

or "in going under."

As though the mercury's…

As though the mercury's under its tongue, it won't

talk. As though with the mercury in its sphincter,

immobile, by a leaf-coated pond

a statue stands white like a blight of winter.

After such snow, there is nothing indeed: the ins

and outs of centuries, pestered heather.

That's what coming full circle means –

when your countenance starts to resemble weather,

when Pygmalion's vanished. And you are free

to cloud your folds, to bare the navel.

Future at last! That is, bleached debris

of a glacier amid the five-lettered "never."

Hence the routine of a goddess, nee

alabaster, that lets roving pupils gorge on

the heart of color and the temperature of the knee.

That's what it looks like inside a virgin.

­To a Tyrant (Translated by Alan Myers)

This and other works of Joseph Brodsky in an essay by Alexander Veytsman "A tyrant up close: Joseph Brodsky's "To a tyrant" poem" are offered by RT partner, the Cardinal Points Literary Journal.