Онлайн книга «Бледный огонь»
Who'd seen the Pope, people in books, and God. I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud, A poet and a painter with a taste For realistic objects interlaced With grotesque growths and images of doom. [090] She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room We've kept intact. Its trivia create A still life in her style: the paperweight Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon, The verse book open at the Index (Moon, Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar, The human skull; and from the local Star A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5–4 On Chapman's Homer, thumb tacked to the door. My God died young. Theolatry I found [100] Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs a God; but was I free? How fully I felt nature glued to me And how my childish palate loved the taste Half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste! My picture book was at an early age The painted parchment papering our cage: Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenon The iridule — when beautiful and strange, [110] In a bright sky above a mountain range One opal cloudlet in an oval form Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm Which in a distant valley has been staged — For we are most artistically caged. And there's the wall of sound: the nightly wall Raised by a trillion crickets in the fall. Impenetrable! Halfway up the hill I'd pause in thrall of their delirious trill. That's Dr. Sutton's light. That's the Great Bear. [120] A thousand years ago five minutes were Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head They close like giant wings, and you are dead. The regular vulgarian, I daresay, Is happier: he sees the Milky Way Only when making water. Then as now I walked at my own risk: whipped by the bough, Tripped by the stump. Asthmatic, lame and fat, [130] I never bounced a ball or swung a bat. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By feigned remoteness in the windowpane. I had a brain, five senses (one unique), But otherwise I was a cloutish freak. In sleeping dreams I played with other chaps But really envied nothing — save perhaps The miracle of a lemniscate left Upon wet sand by nonchalantly deft Bicycle tires. A thread of subtle pain, [140] Tugged at by playful death, released again, But always present, ran through me. One day, When I'd just turned eleven, as I lay Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy — A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy — Bypass chair legs and stray beneath the bed, There was a sudden sunburst in my head. And then black night. That blackness was sublime. I felt distributed through space and time: One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand [150] Under the pebbles of a panting strand, One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain, In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain. There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene, An icy shiver down my Age of Stone, And all tomorrows in my funnybone. During one winter every afternoon I'd sink into that momentary swoon. And then it ceased. Its memory grew dim. [160] My health improved. I even learned to swim. But like some little lad forced by a wench With his pure tongue her abject thirst to quench, I was corrupted, terrified, allured, And though old doctor Colt pronounced me cured Of what, he said, were mainly growing pains, The wonder lingers and the shame remains. Canto Two
There was a time in my demented youth When somehow I suspected that the truth About survival after death was known [170] To every human being: I alone Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy Of books and people hid the truth from me. There was the day when I began to doubt Man's sanity: How could he live without Knowing for sure what dawn, what death, what doom Awaited consciousness beyond the tomb? And finally there was the sleepless night When I decided to explore and fight The foul, the inadmissible abyss, [180] Devoting all my twisted life to this One task. Today I'm sixty-one. Waxwings Are berry-pecking. A cicada sings. The little scissors I am holding are A dazzling synthesis of sun and star. I stand before the window and I pare My fingernails and vaguely am aware Of certain flinching likenesses: the thumb, Our grocer's son; the index, lean and glum College astronomer Starover Blue; [190] The middle fellow, a tall priest I knew; The feminine fourth finger, an old flirt; And little pinky clinging to her skirt. And I make mouths as I snip off the thin Strips of what Aunt Maud used to call «scarf-skin.» Maud Shade was eighty when a sudden hush |