СТИХОТВОРЕНИЯ НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ И ФРАНЦУЗСКОМ ЯЗЫКАХ

POEMS AND PROBLEMS{*}

415. A LITERARY DINNER{*}

Come here, said my hostess, her face making room for one of those pink introductory smiles that link, like a valley of fruit trees in bloom, the slopes of two names. I want you, she murmured, to eat Dr. James. I was hungry. The Doctor looked good. He had read the great book of the week and had liked it, he said, because it was powerful. So I was brought a generous helping. His mauve-bosomed wife kept showing me, very politely, I thought, the tenderest bits with the point of her knife. I ate — and in Egypt the sunsets were swell; The Russians were doing remarkably well; had I met a Prince Poprinsky, whom he had known in Caparabella, or was it Mentone? They had traveled extensively, he and his wife; her hobby was People, his hobby was Life. All was good and well cooked, but the tastiest part was his nut-flavored, crisp cerebellum. The heart resembled a shiny brown date, and I stowed all the studs on the edge of my plate. <11 апреля> 1942

416. THE REFRIGERATOR AWAKES{*}

Crash! And if darkness could sound, it would sound like this giant waking up in the torture house, trying to die and not dying, and trying not to cry and immediately crying that he will, that he will, that he will do his best to adjust his dark soul to the pressing request of the only true frost, and he pants and he gasps and he rasps and he wheezes: ice is the solid form when the water freezes; a volatile liquid (see «Refrigerating») is permitted to pass into evaporating coils, where it boils, which somehow seems wrong, and I wonder how long it will rumble and shudder and crackle and pound; Scudder, the Alpinist, slipped and was found half a century later preserved in blue ice with his bride and two guides and a dead edelweiss; a German has proved that the snowflakes we see are the germ cells of stars and the sea life to be; hold the line, hold the line, lest its tale be untold; let it amble along through the thumping pain and horror of dichlordisomethingmethane, a trembling white heart with the frost froth upon it, Nova Zembla, poor thing, with that В in her bonnet, stunned bees in the bonnets of cars on hot roads, Keep it Kold, says a poster in passing, and lo, loads, of bright fruit, and a ham, and some chocolate cream, and three bottles of milk, all contained in the gleam of that wide-open white god, the pride and delight of starry-eyed couples in dream kitchenettes, and it groans and it drones and it toils and it sweats — Shackleton, pemmican, penguin, Poe's Рут — collapsing at last in the criminal night. <28 ноября 1941>

417. A DISCOVERY{*}

I found it in a legendary land all rocks and lavender and tufted grass, where it was settled on some sodden sand hard by the torrent of a mountain pass. The features it combines mark it as new to science: shape and shade — the special tinge, akin to moonlight, tempering its blue, the dingy underside, the checquered fringe. My needles have teased our its sculptured sex; corroded tissues could no longer hide that priceless mote now dimpling the convex and limpid teardrop on a lighted slide. Smoothly a screw is turned; our of the mist two ambered hooks symmetrically slope, or scales like battledores of amethyst cross the charmed circle of the microscope. I found it and I named it, being versed in taxonomic Latin; thus became godfather to an insect and its first describer — and I want no other fame. Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep), and safe from creeping relatives and rust, in the secluded stronghold where we keep type specimens it will transcend its dust. Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss, poems that take a thousand years to die but ape the immortality of this red label on a little butterfly. <12 января> 1943

418. THE POEM{*}

Not the sunset poem you make when you think aloud, with its linden tree in India ink and the telegraph wires across its pink cloud; not the mirror in you and her delicate bare shoulder still glimmering there; not the lyrical click of a pocket rhyme — the tiny music that tells the time; and not the pennies and weights on those evening papers piled up in the rain; not the cacodemons of carnal pain; not the things you can say so much better in plain prose — but the poem that hurtles from heights unknown — when you wait for the splash of the stone deep below, and grope for your pen, and then comes the shiver, and then — in the tangle of sounds, the leopards of words, the leaflike insects, the eye-spotted birds fuse and form a silent, intense, mimetic pattern of perfect sense. <10 июня> 1944 вернутьсявернутьсявернутьсявернутьсявернуться