Friday, December 07, 2012

Where To Put The Quote.

Quote quoted at me from (possibly genius but scary in perverted Lolita manner) Nabokov (the book called I think Pale Fire) a poem which goes or went:


It missed the gist of the whole thing; it missed
What mostly interests the preterist;
For we die every day; oblivion thrives
Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,
And our best yesterdays are now foul piles
Of crumpled names, phone numbers & foxed files.
I'm ready to become a floweret
Or a fat fly, but never, to forget.
& I'll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy & the tenderness
Of mortal life; the passion & the pain;
The claret taillight of that dwindling plane
Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay
On running out of cigarettes; the way
You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime
Snails leave on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme,
This index card, this slender rubber band
Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand,
Are found in Heaven by the newlydead
Stored in its strongholds through the years.

& I liked it!

But then Nabokov was all like:
& I didn't say I liked it out loud all that much though I did.  Really I did.

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