Бледный огонь

Low hum of harmony. The brain is drained
And a brown ament, and the noun I meant
To use but did not, dry on the cement.
Maybe my sensual love for the consonne
D'appui, Echo's fey child, is based upon
A feeling of fantastically planned,
⁹⁷⁰ Richly rhymed life.
                     I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight;
And if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which I suspect is an iambic line.
I'm reasonably sure that we survive
And that my darling somewhere is alive,
As I am reasonably sure that I
⁹⁸⁰ Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July
The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine,
And that the day will probably be fine;
So this alarm clock let me set myself,
Yawn, and put back Shade's «Poems» on their shelf.

But it's not bedtime yet. The sun attains
Old Dr. Sutton's last two windowpanes.
The man must be — what? Eighty? Eighty-two?
Was twice my age the year I married you.
Where are you? In the garden. I can see
⁹⁹⁰ Part of your shadow near the shagbark tree.
Somewhere horseshoes are being tossed. Click, Clunk.
(Leaning against its lamppost like a drunk.)
A dark Vanessa with crimson band
Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand
And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white.
And through the flowing shade and ebbing light
A man, unheedful of the butterfly —
Some neighbor's gardener, I guess — goes by
Trundling an empty barrow up the lane.
¹⁰⁰⁰ […]

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Примечания

1

Две бейсбольные команды.

2

Термин в бейсболе. Чэпмен — знаменитый переводчик Гомера.

3

Я кормлю бедных цикад (Крылов перевел «стрекоза» вместо «цикада»).

4

Чайка по-английски «sea-gull».

5

Взбираться.

6

Зловещее перо.

7

Хтонический.