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William Matthews - Nabokov’s Blues
Work rating: Low

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.
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