Your Departure

Departure

Written for Bluebell Books Short Story Slam Week 9


Joseph Brodsky said,

"After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life."

"Bad literature is a form of treason."

"For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey." 

Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996), was a Russian-American poet and essayist. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 for alleged "social parasitism" and settled in America with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters. He taught thereafter at universities including those at Yale, Cambridge and Michigan.

Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity". He was appointed American Poet Laureate in 1991.

A movie based on his life has been made, "A Room And A Half", directed by Andrey Khrzhanovsky.

Your Departure

I doubt I can say

what it is you did to me

when taking your leave,

acting the pirate

as if this was a movie

and you a golden

coin with evil eye

upon me striped and flayed, flensed,

my strips left out to

dry.  That good enough?

Written September 8, 2011   10:12 PM