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In the Lake District

In those days, in a place where dentists thrive
(their daughters order fancy clothes from London;
their painted forceps hold aloft on signboards
a common and abstracted Wisdom Tooth),
there I--whose mouth held ruins more abject
than any Parthenon--a spy, a spearhead
for some fifth column of a rotting culture
(my cover was lit. professorship),
was living at a college near the most
renowned of the fresh-water lakes; the function
to which I'd been appointed was to wear out
the patience of the ingenuous local youth.

Whatever I wrote then was incomplete:
my lines expired in strings of dots. Collapsing,
I dropped, still fully dressed, upon my bed.
At night I stared up at the darkened ceiling
until I saw a shooting star, which then, conforming to the laws of self-combustion
would flash--before I'd even made a wish--
across my cheek and down onto my pillow.

-Joseph Brodsky, 1980