ITHAKA

By Joseph Brodsky
trans. Zara M. Torlone

To return here after twenty years,
to find barefoot in the sand your own foot prints
and the mongrel dog’s barking fills the entire wharf
not because he is happy but because he has gone wild.

If you wish to, throw off those rags soaked in sweat
but the servant who can recognize your scar is dead,
and the one, they say, who waited for you
is nowhere to be found for she put out for everybody.

Your son has grown tall: he is a sailor himself
and he looks at you as if you were scum.
And the language they all shout in
is a futile labor, it seems, to decipher.

Whether it’s not that island or it is indeed
because you drowned your eye in blueness,
your eye because fastidious:
from the patch of earth, it seems, the waves will
not forgot the horizon, dashing on.