Текст песни Бродский - Развивая Платона

I would like to live, Fortunatus, in the city where the river
     would protrude from under the bridge, as if from a sleeve - a hand,
        and so that she falls into the bay, spreading her fingers,
     like Chopin, showing no fist.

     For Opera to be there, and for a veteran to be there
     the tenor regularly sang Mario's aria in the evenings;
        so that Tyrant applauded him in the box, and I on the ground
     would mutter, gritting his teeth in hatred: "ram."

     This city would have a yacht club and a football club.
     By the absence of smoke from brick factory pipes
        I would know about Sunday
     and would shake on the bus for a long time, tormenting rub.

     I would weave my voice in a common animal howl
     where the leg continues with the head.
        Of all the laws made by Hammurabi,
     the most important - penalty and corner.

        II

     There would be a library, and in its empty halls
     I would flip through volumes with the same number of commas,
        like the number of bad words in daily speech,
     not breaking into prose, nor, moreover, into the verse.

     There would be a large train station, damaged in the war,
     with a facade, which is much more interesting than the outside world.
        There, at the sight of a green palm in an airline window
     a monkey would wake up dozing in me.

     And when winter, Fortunatus, encircles the quarter in a row,
     I would have missed the Gallery, where every canvas
        - especially Ingres or David -
     how a birthmark would look like a stain.

     At dusk I would follow in the herd window
     mooing cars scurrying back and forth
        past slender naked columns with a Doric haircut,
     serene whitening on the pediment of the Court.

        III

     There would be this coffee shop with a thumbs up blanche,
     where, saying that why do we need the twentieth century, if there is already
        nineteenth century, I would see the look of a colleague
     focuses on a fork or knife for a long time.

     There should be that street with trees in two rows,
     porch with a torso of a nymph in a niche and other nonsense;
        and the portrait would hang in the living room, giving you an introduction
     about how the hostess looked like being young.

     I would listen to an even voice telling things
     not related to candlelight dinner,
        and the fire in the dungeon, Fortunatus, would cast a crimson glow
     on a green dress. But at the end of conceptions.

     Time, current unlike water
     horizontally from tuesday to wednesday,
        in the dark there would smooth out wrinkles
     and erase their own tracks.

        IV

     And there would be monuments. I would know the names
     not only bronze riders stuck in stirrups
        stories of their leg, but also of their four-legged ones,
     given the imprint left by them on

     the population of the city. And with a lip dry
     with a cigarette after midnight, walking back to his place,
        like a gypsy palm, on cracks on the pavement
     I would have wondered, hiccuping, out loud about his fate.

     And when they eventually grabbed me for espionage,
     subversive activity, vagrancy, menazh-
        a-true, and the crowd would rage around screaming,
     poking at me with stressed indexes: "Not ours!" -

     I would secretly be happy whispering to myself: “Look,
     this is your chance to find out how it looks from the inside
        what you looked at for so long from the outside;
     remember the details, exclaiming "Vive la Patrie!"