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the heavens.
    Foolish is he who does not fear
    his Lord; death comes to him
    though he is unprepared.
    Blessed is he who lives in all
    humility; what comes to him
    in Heaven is forgiveness.
    God gave to him that spirit
    to bow to all His power.
    A man must steer his passions,
    be strong in staying steady;
    keep promises, be pure.
    He must be wise and fair
    with foes as much as friends,
    well-tempered in himself.
    He dreads to see a dear one
    engulfed in flames, yet patience
    tells him to trust the sway
    of Fate, and that God’s might
    is greater than we know.
    Let us ponder where our true
    home is, and how to reach it.
    Let us labor to gain entry
    into the eternal,
    to find the blessedness
    of belonging to the Lord
    joyfully on high.
    Thanks be to God who loved us,
    the endless Father, the Prince
    of Glory forever. Amen.

VII
 
    LOST ORIGINALS

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.
    Well, here’s one for you, touching and grotesque.
    After you died, a citizen of the States,
    they shipped some furniture of yours in crates
    to Petersburg: your velvet couch, your desk—
    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.
        2. Tears at the Fountain House
    Out in the garden, where for years her spies
    chain-smoked while she sat indoors and nearly starved,
    an art show. Wine and cheese are being served.
    Today’s the opening, and a viewer’s eyes
    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