Nothing by Design

VOICE OF AMERICA

I sit at my desk

My life is grotesque.

—JOSEPH BRODSKY

1. Open to the Public

Hard labor? But you’d claim it wasn’t hard.

You sat in your log cabin, ably sketching

another cabin, and some chickens scratching

out their appointed living in the yard.

A farmhand reading poems by kerosene,

you plotted carefully the coup d’état

of yourself, and boiled another cup of tea;

a well-turned sentence made you feel serene.

I sit in Russia’s National Library,

rifling through folders of your private stuff.

They came easily—or not easily enough,

illiterate as I am in the very

language which to you was the first god.

Your faintly ruled, cheap spiral notebooks hatched

fresh images, new chickens came unlatched

from their coop, and from a corner, a man’s head—

a twenty-something profile. That was yours.

You doodled, and you knew your keepers well.

You studied English, though you couldn’t spell;

you daydreamed in unguarded metaphors.

actually two of them—from your South Hadley

room and a half. Or so your house had seemed,

those maple floors as slippery as in the dreamed

Leningrad apartment; brightly, sadly,

you’d write your parents, who had watched you jammed

into a taxi, snapped in a photograph,

and lost forever. Your desk sent here? I’d laugh,

if it were funny, studying a framed

Madonna and child, a cat, a Mandelstam,

an Auden; a pocket-sized address book, still

open to the last call; your manual

typewriter, outdated as a ham

radio no one again can operate.

The last icon is you. Incredible.

That’s you in tuxedo tails, with your Nobel,

in a video that loops as if your fate

had always been a hero’s. Applause and cheers

repeat on the TV screen within a house

that once was your old friend Akhmatova’s:

hero without a poem for years and years.

are free to interpret anyhow, it appears.

Hung as if on cobwebs, or on memories

of traumas left unspoken, from the trees

giant water balloons droop like the tears

in your poetry that welled and wouldn’t land.

(Your mother told you weeping was for grave

occasions: obedient, you were brave.)

Don’t touch the tears. I brush one with my hand,

stroll about the grounds, and though I doubt

you’d love the installation, you’d round up

some artsy types—high-booted girls and hip

boyfriends in ripped jeans—and ask them out

to a smoky bar nearby, if you were here.

But you never will be. Never came back to grill

the next generation, shame them, crush their will—

or that’s how your taunts and teasing, your severe

quizzing came off, exiled to the warm

and fuzzy American classroom. Coeds cried.

You shrugged and tried again: identified

lines where native speakers missed the poem.

I was—or maybe you were; I wasn’t sure.

Now it occurs to me: the poem of his

to recite into these flower beds would be less

“The Garden” than the twining “Eyes and Tears,”

where “all the jewels which we prize,” he wrote,

“melt in these pendants of the eyes”; and “happy they

whom grief doth bless, that weep the more, and see

the less.” Lovely; but the tears stayed in the throat,

or were meted out in rhyming drops of ink.

Lament was Russian, roughly; in the English

of Marvell, Hardy, Frost, you got your wish

for irony’s containments. You could think.

3. Border Crossing

You had them in your head—Pushkin, Gogol,

Dostoevsky. Best memory I ever met.

Nobody learns by rote now; quotes come out

from under the patchwork overcoat of Google—

a development you’d have found unnerving,

at least until you found some figure for it.

In Venice, you wrote, “a gigantic china teaset”

was heard vibrating when church bells were serving

as if everything in the world could be amassed

on a single page in white with words in black,

although a tear might drop to it, a “throwback,

a tribute of the future to the past.”

Somebody boarded up, because they could,

the door from your parents’ room to yours. Or yours

to your parents’; but to me it hardly matters:

the living border crossing to the dead

is what I’m after. I stepped onto a plane

because I could, and joined your friend who’d taken

snapshots of your departure; though I’m shaken

to be standing in their one room—mute and plain,

erased of bed and table, of evidence

of birthday parties, songs at the piano,

piled‑up cups and saucers, the radio

from which state “drivel” flowed like water once—

I don’t need much, only to turn and walk

down warped linoleum in the communal hall

where the black phone still cowers on the wall,

to see you—overheard—pick up and talk.

some of us know little of. Academician

Likhachev, they tell us, would have liked

to meet us all. Your fellowships, in fact,

our conversations here, were his late mission,

he whose life would closely coincide

with the twentieth century; who bore the stamp

of public servant, scholar, and of camp

prisoner. A miracle he hadn’t died

at Solovki, where he heard three hundred gunned

down as he hid, three hundred on the dot—

he was to be among them, but was not,

which meant that someone else…The thought-of sound

reverberates on walls washed with the sun.

This was his radio. Mid-century relic,

midsized, ordinary, somehow orphic.

Likhachev marked it—see the painted line

dripping down the tuner? That’s the Voice

of America. Others marked the BBC.

This was a sign we wanted you to see…

The hardened teardrop holds its frequency.