I'm going to read "Souffrance".
This is for a poet, Daniel Simcoe,
who was a close friend of mine.
He was an unknown poet who refused to publish
his poetry when he was alive.
He worked in the New York Public Library,
so he was a librarian by profession.
He was from former Czechoslovakia
from the same village where my family was from.
That was what brought us together as friends.
The Joseph in this poem is Joseph Brodsky.
The poem is "Souffrance", which is suffering.
I think of you in that sea of graves beyond the city,
where many stones have been left among them mine,
a little piece of dolomite to weigh down a slip of paper.
I would have put your gloves and umbrella
in the coffin along with one more morning in Berlin
with Tanya, an hour of pigeons rising around you,
lilacs wrapped in news stories, a minute at the barricades,
another riding on your father's shoulders
through the garlic fields even cigarettes left over
from the occupation I would have placed there.
Instead, this notebook.
A pen full of ink and that short poem by Holderlin
you loved so you could go up in smoke together.
You, the notebook, the pen, the poem by Holderlin.
In the aftermath you are emulsion
on paper, a corpse listening beneath the ground
to a train passing through a Polaroid of clouds.
It was Joseph who said, that for all eternity
Venice would happen only once.
You are a ghost then following a ghost back
through its only life, or as you say now,
there were many cities but never a city twice.