Pale Fire (Vintage International)

I’m ready to become a floweret Or a fat fly, but never, to forget.

A wrench, a rift—that’s all one can foresee. Maybe one finds le grand néant; maybe Again one spirals from the tuber’s eye.

And so I pare my nails, and muse, and hear Your steps upstairs, and all is right, my dear.

And all the time, and all the time, my love, 950 You too are there, beneath the word, above 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 yo

I feel I understand Existence, or at least a minute part Of my existence, only through my art,

Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed, 270 My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest My Admirable butterfly! Explain How could you, in the gloam of Lilac Lane, Have let uncouth, hysterical John Shade Blubber your face, and ear, and shoulder blade?

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, fra

cognomen

I love you when you call me to admire A jet’s pink trail above the sunset fire.