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“ON LOVE”
Twice I woke up tonight
and wandered to
the window. And the
lights down on the street,
like pale omission points,
tried to complete
the fragment of a
sentence spoken through
sleep, but diminished
darkness, too.
I’d dreamt that you were
pregnant, and in spite
of having lived so many
years apart
I still felt guilty and my
heartened palm
caressed your belly as, by
the bedside,
it fumbled for my trousers
and the light-
switch on the wall. And
with the bulb turned on
I knew that I was leaving
you alone
there, in the darkness, in
the dream, where calmly
you waited till I might
return,
not trying to reproach or
scold me
for the unnatural hiatus.
For
darkness restores what
light cannot repair.
There we are married,
blest, we make once more
the two-backed beast and
children are the fair
excuse of what we’re
naked for.
Some future night you will
appear again.
You’ll come to me, worn
out and thin now, after
things in between, and I’ll
see son or daughter
not named as yet. This
time I will restrain
my hand from groping for
the switch, afraid
and feeling that I have no
right
to leave you both like
shadows by that sever-
ing fence of days that bar
your sight,
voiceless, negated by the
real light
that keeps me
unattainable forever.
JOSEPH BRODSKY.
(Translated by Daniel
Weissbort with the author).
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