A Poet Reflects

A Polar Explorer

All the huskies are eaten.  There is no space
left in the diary.  And the beads of quick
words scatter over his spouse’s sepia-shaded face
adding the date in question like a mole to her lovely cheek.
Next, the snapshot of his sister.  He doesn’t spare his kin:
what’s been reached is the highest possible latitude!
And, like the silk stocking of a burlesque half-nude
queen, it climbs up his thigh: gangrene.

—Joseph Brodsky, from To Urania (The Noonday Press, 1988)

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”

—Joseph Brodsky

                                           The star looked in across the threshold.
                                           The only one of them who could
                                           know the meaning of that look
                                           was the infant. But He did not speak.

— The last stanza from “Flight into Egypt (2)” in Nativity Poems by Joseph Brodsky, December 1995, translated by Seamus Heaney