Онлайн книга «Бледный огонь»
Which goes on solely in the poet's mind, A testing of performing words, while he Is soaping a third time one leg, and B, The other kind, much more decorous, when He's in his study writing with a pen. In method В the hand supports the thought, The abstract battle is concretely fought. The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar [850] A canceled sunset or restore a star, And thus it physically guides the phrase Toward faint daylight through the inky maze. But method A is agony! The brain Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain. A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the will Can interrupt, while the automaton Is taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store [860] To buy the paper he has read before. Why is it so? Is it, perhaps, because In penless work there is no pen-poised pause And one must use three hands at the same time, Having to choose the necessary rhyme, Hold the completed line before one's eyes, And keep in mind all the preceding tries? Or is the process deeper with no desk To prop the false and hoist the poetesque? For there are those mysterious moments when [870] Too weary to delete, I drop my pen; I ambulate — and by some mute command The right word flutes and perches on my hand. My best time is the morning; my preferred Season, midsummer. I once overheard Myself awakening while half of me Still slept in bed. I tore my spirit free, And caught up with myself — upon the lawn Where clover leaves cupped the topaz of the dawn, And where Shade stood in nightshirt and one shoe. [880] And then I realized that this half too Was fast asleep; both laughed and I awoke Safe in my bed as day its eggshell broke, And robins walked and stopped, and on the damp Gemmed turf a brown shoe lay! My secret stamp, The Shade impress, the mystery inborn. Mirages, miracles, midsummer morn. Since my biographer may be too staid Or know too little to affirm that Shade Shaved in his bath, here goes: «He'd fixed a sort [890] Of hinge-and-screw affair, a steel support Running across the tub to hold in place The shaving mirror right before his face And with his toe renewing tap-warmth, he'd Sit like a king there, and like Marat bleed.» The more I weigh, the less secure my skin; In places it's ridiculously thin; Thus near the mouth: the space between its wick And my grimace, invites the wicked nick. Or this dewlap: some day I must set free [900] The Newport Frill inveterate in me. My Adam's apple is a prickly pear: Now I shall speak of evil and despair As none has spoken. Five, six, seven, eight, Nine strokes are not enough. Ten. I palpate Through strawberry-and-cream the gory mess And find unchanged that patch of prickliness. I have my doubts about the one-armed bloke Who in commercials with one gliding stroke Clears a smooth path of flesh from ear to chin, [910] Then wipes his face and fondly tries his skin. I'm in the class of fussy bimanists. As a discreet ephebe in tights assists A female in an acrobatic dance, My left hand helps, and holds, and shifts its stance. Now I shall speak… Better than any soap Is the sensation for which poets hope When inspiration and its icy blaze, The sudden image, the immediate phrase Over the skin a triple ripple send [920] Making the little hairs all stand on end As in the enlarged animated scheme Of whiskers mowed when held up by Our Cream. Now I shall speak of evil as none has Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz; The white-hosed moron torturing a black Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac; Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools; Music in supermarkets; swimming pools; Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx, [930] Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks. And while the safety blade with scrape and screak Travels across the country of my cheek, Cars on the highway pass, and up the steep Incline big trucks around my jawbone creep, And now a silent liner docks, and now Sunglassers tour Beirut, and now I plough Old Zembla's fields where my gray stubble grows, And slaves make hay between my mouth and nose. Man's life as commentary to abstruse [940] Unfinished poem. Note for further use. Dressing in all the rooms, I rhyme and roam Throughout the house with, in my fist, a comb Or a shoehorn, which turns into the spoon I eat my egg with. In the afternoon You drive me to the library. We dine At half past six. And that odd muse of mine, My versipel, is with me everywhere, In carrel and in car, and in my chair. And all the time, and all the time, my love, [950] You too are there, beneath the word, above |