Nabokov’s Blues
William Matthews
The wallful of quoted passages from his work,with the requisite specimens pinned nextto their literary cameo appearances, was too gooda temptation to resist, and if the curator couldn’t,why should we? The prose dipped and shimmeredand the “flies,” as I heard a buff call them.....
it’s an accident Melissa rhymes, sort of, with Lolita,The scant hour we could lavish on the Bluesflew by, and we improvised a path through carsand 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 nothingit mourned to lose.....
This is the sweet ache that hurts most, the waydesire burns bluely at its phosphorescent core:just as you’re having what you wanted most,you want it more and more until that’s morethan you, or it, or both of you, can bear.
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