Hence all rhymes – A tribute to Joseph Brodsky
Edited by Specimen
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(for Joseph Brodsky)
i
On the bright road to Rome, beyond Mantua,
there were reeds of rice, and I heard, in the wind’s elation,
the brown dogs of Latin panting alongside the car,
their shadows sliding on the verge in smooth translation,
past fields fenced by poplars, stone farms in character,
nouns from a schoolboy’s text, Vergilian, Horatian,
phrases from Ovid passing in a green blur
heading towards perspectives of noseless busts
open-mouthed ruins and roofless corridors
of Caesars whose second mantle is now the dust’s,
and this voice that rustles out of the reeds is yours.
To every line there is a time and a season.
You refreshed forms and stanzas, these cropped fields are
your stubble grating my cheeks with departure,
grey irises, your corn-wisps of hair blowing away,
say you haven’t vanished, you’re still in Italy.
Yeah. Very still. God. Still as the turning fields
of Lombardy, still as the white wastes of that prison
like pages erased by a regime. Though his landscape heals
the exile you shared with Naso, poetry is still treason
because it is truth. Your poplars spin in the sun.
Published May 19, 2026
© FSG, 1997
Few poets lived by language in such a thorough and relentless way as Joseph Brodsky. Almost fanatically, frantically so. Ethically, insofar as ethics itself is mothered by aesthetics. Insofar as “language that is intolerant, and indifferent in a week to a beautiful physique, worships language and forgives anyone by whom it lives” Brodsky is still present, physically and linguistically so, thirty years after he disappeared in the dead of winter, on January 28th 1996, for all those who met him, textually or in person. Talking, standing next to a fridge or walking fast through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
Hence, few poets are so alive in other poets’ verse, are addressed so often as if present, because of their presence, in other poets’ poems. On the day of his birth, May 24th, Specimen publishes and translates some of these, conjuring Joseph’s presence through the verse, and the absence, of this most unique family of good poets, good friends, Seamus, Derek, Adam and Mark among them.
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