Nabokov’s Blues

The wallful of quoted passages from his work,

with the requisite specimens pinned next

to their literary cameo appearances, was too good

a temptation to resist, and if the curator couldn’t,

why should we? The prose dipped and shimmered

and the “flies,” as I heard a buff call them, stood

at lurid attention on their pins. If you love to read

and look, you could be happy a month in that small

room. One of the Nabokov photos I’d never seen:

he’s writing (left-handed! why did I never trouble

to find out?) at his stand-up desk in the hotel

apartment in Montreux. The picture’s mostly

of his back and the small wedge of face that shows

brims with indifference to anything not on the page.

The window’s shut. A tiny lamp trails a veil of light

over the page, too far away for us to read.

We also liked the chest of specimen drawers

labeled, as if for apprentice Freudians,

“Genitalia,” wherein languished in phials

the thousands he examined for his monograph

on the Lycaenidae, the silver-studded Blues.

And there in the center of the room a carillon

of Blues rang mutely out. There must have been

three hundred of them. Amanda’s Blue was there,

and the Chalk Hill Blue, the Karner Blue

(Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov),         

a Violet-Tinged Copper, the Mourning Cloak,

an Echo Azure, the White-Lined Green Hairstreak,

the Cretan Argus (known only from Mt. Ida:

in the series Nabokov did on this beauty

he noted for each specimen the altitude at which

it had been taken), and as the ads and lovers say,

“and much, much more.” The stilled belle of the tower

was a Lycaeides melissa melissa. No doubt

it’s an accident Melissa rhymes, sort of, with Lolita,         

The scant hour we could lavish on the Blues

flew by, and we improvised a path through cars

and slush and boot-high berms of mud-blurred snow

to wherever we went next. I must have been mute,

or whatever I said won from silence nothing

it mourned to lose. I was back in that small

room, vast by love of each flickering detail,

each genital dusting to nothing, the turn,

like a worm’s or caterpillar’s, of each phrase.

I stood up to my ankles in sludge pooled

over a stopped sewer grate and thought—

wouldn’t you know it—about love and art:

you can be ruined (“rurnt,” as we said in south-

western Ohio) by a book or improved by

a butterfly. You can dodder in the slop,

septic with a rage not for order but for the love

the senses bear for what they do, for detail

that’s never annexed, like a reluctant crumb

to a vacuum cleaner, to a coherence.

You can be bead after bead on perception’s rosary.

This is the sweet ache that hurts most, the way

desire burns bluely at its phosphorescent core:

just as you’re having what you wanted most,

you want it more and more until that’s more

than you, or it, or both of you, can bear.