In memory of Joseph Brodsky
(1940-1996)
A poet has four bodies.
The Soviet authorities
were too late for the first,
your private polity
which, by now, had chosen democracy
and a funeral parlour
where the credit due
was given entirely to you.
You lay there, an archipelago.
Your wife had the second,
the basic note
against which poets conjugate
the intrigue between things and rhyme,
that murderous love affair with time.
Heart gave you away. Its metronome
was treacherous to you.
Now you don’t, but your couplets scan:
you’ve left all desire to rehearse
the conjugal couplets of deep verse.
Without you, your widow lives in vers libre.
The third is your work.
Books perch like birds
in the palms of our open hands and feed
on our attention as we read.
We willingly give your words our breath.
The fourth is your soul.
It left you like a hawk
in search, no doubt, of other work.
Joseph, let snowflakes from its raptor cry
fall back into blankness, till the tip of a tongue
catches one of its crystals, tasting no less
than the terror of nothing more to express.
Even a healthy heart is lame,
limps its iambic from pillar to post,
with every ventricle pumping the same
flawed syncopation – ‘I am, I am.’
Hospital tags are expensive jewellery.
Metre became the cardiogram
you lived by, words at each peak. After all,
each poet is a walk-in heart
filled with world’s whooshing. Pause. Then a hall.
The wind on Bangor Pier draws tears
to my eyes as I tread out along each plank,
feeling my usual vertigo
at the strobe of the rucked-up tide below.
You wished me horizon in another place.
I walk out further, each lath of wood
a line of your work that will bear my weight
over the drift of the Menai Straits.
Though absent, you give me solid land.
Six planks to go and I’m out on the edge.
Stamina, you said, is a matter of style.
I find that horizon, grip it like steel.