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Joseph Brodsky

There and back again.

August 10, 2017 by L.S. Johnson

I am back. Sadly not from Helsinki, but from helping my parents move from New York to Florida. Like many New Yorkers, they swore all their lives they would never move down to Florida; like many New Yorkers, in the end it was really their best option.

Everyone in their neighborhood is from somewhere else. Ohio, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Ontario …. It’s rather like when I first moved to San Francisco: it was months before I met a born-and-bred resident.

All in all, it was a bittersweet time. I left New York two decades ago, but through my parents I went back often. Now that last tie is severed. When I took that first fateful flight to San Francisco all those years ago, I had just bought a book of poems by Joseph Brodsky and I kept turning over and over these lines from “May 24, 1980”

Quit the city that bore and nursed me.
Those who forgot me would make a city.

to the point where I had them memorized. They are truer now than when I first read them.


At some point this past weekend, I was sitting outside a Stuckey’s in South Carolina with this window before me and the quite respectable sales numbers for Harkworth Hall on my phone. I am grateful to everyone who made it such a good launch, who took a chance on Caroline. Still, sometimes this writer—who grew up with corded telephones and five channels of television—is struck dumb by this world, today, now.

 

Filed Under: Process Tagged With: family, Harkworth Hall, Joseph Brodsky

joseph brodsky

November 25, 2012 by L.S. Johnson

thinking today on what has come before.  and also that i needed a poem, today.  a familiar poem.  hashtag amrevising, hashtag amwriting.  this slow sunday with the shape of milan finally emerging, and some glimmering sense of sea-change, just past my line of sight.

——————————————~

May 24, 1980
by Joseph Brodsky

I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages,
carved my term and nickname on bunks and rafters,
lived by the sea, flashed aces in an oasis,
dined with the-devil-knows-whom, in tails, on truffles.
From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the
earthly
width. Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my
nitty-gritty.
Quit the country that bore and nursed me.
Those who forgot me would make a city.
I have waded the steppes that saw yelling Huns in saddles,
worn the clothes nowadays back in fashion in every quarter,
planted rye, tarred the roofs of pigsties and stables,
guzzled everything save dry water.
I’ve admitted the sentries’ third eye into my wet and foul
dreams. Munched the bread of exile; it’s stale and warty.
Granted my lungs all sounds except the howl;
switched to a whisper. Now I am forty.
What should I say about my life? That it’s long and abhors
transparence.
Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelet, though, makes me
vomit.
Yet until brown clay has been rammed down my larynx,
only gratitude will be gushing from it.

Filed Under: Reading Tagged With: Joseph Brodsky, May 24 1980

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