Онлайн книга «Бледный огонь»
The syllable, to underscore and stress The vital rhythm. One heard a woman's dress Rustle in days of yore. I've often caught The sound and sense of your approaching thought. And all in you is youth, and you make new, By quoting them, old things I made for you. Dim Gulf was my first book (free verse); Night Rote Came next; then Hebe's Cup, my final float In that damp carnival, for now I term [960] Everything «Poems,» and no longer squirm. (But this transparent thingum does require Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire.) Gently the day has passed in a sustained Low hum of harmony. The brain is drained And a brown ament, and the noun I meant To use but did not, dry on the cement. Maybe my sensual love for the consonne D'appui, Echo's fey child, is based upon A feeling of fantastically planned, [970] Richly rhymed life. I feel I understand Existence, or at least a minute part Of my existence, only through my art, In terms of combinational delight; And if my private universe scans right, So does the verse of galaxies divine Which I suspect is an iambic line. I'm reasonably sure that we survive And that my darling somewhere is alive, As I am reasonably sure that I [980] Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine, And that the day will probably be fine; So this alarm clock let me set myself, Yawn, and put back Shade's «Poems» on their shelf. But it's not bedtime yet. The sun attains Old Dr. Sutton's last two windowpanes. The man must be — what? Eighty? Eighty-two? Was twice my age the year I married you. Where are you? In the garden. I can see [990] Part of your shadow near the shagbark tree. Somewhere horseshoes are being tossed. Click, Clunk. (Leaning against its lamppost like a drunk.) A dark Vanessa with crimson band Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white. And through the flowing shade and ebbing light A man, unheedful of the butterfly — Some neighbor's gardener, I guess — goes by Trundling an empty barrow up the lane. [1000] […] |