88b
PARTISAN REVIEW
ground of subsiding vegetable agitation. Gulfs of voluptuous blue were
expanding betweeh great clouds-heap upon heap of pure white and
purplish gray,
lepota
(Old Russian for "stately beauty"), moving
myths, gouache and guano, among the outlines of which one could
distinguish a mammary allusion or the death mask of a poet.
The tennis court was a region of great lakes.
Beyond the park, above steaming fields, a rainbow slipped into
view; the fields ended in the jagged border of a remote
fir
wood;
part of the rainbow went across it, and that section of the forest edge
shimmered most magically through the pale-green and pink of the
iridescent veil drawn before it; a tenderness and a glory that made
poor relatives of the rhomboidal colored reflections which the return
of the sun had brought forth on the pavilion floor.
A moment later my first poem began. What touched it off?
I think I know. Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a
raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip
to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a
sudden glissando down the center vein, and then, having shed its
bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief-the instant
it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time
as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once
by a patter of rimes: I say "patter" intentionally, for when a gust
of wind did come, the trees would briskly start to drip all together
in as crude an imitation of the recent downpour as the stanza I was
already muttering resembled the spasm of wonder I had experienced
when for a moment heart and leaf had been one.
In the avid heat of the early afternoon, benches, bridges and
boles (everything in fact save the tennis court) were drying with in–
credible rapidity, and soon little remained of my initial inspiration.
Although the bright fissure had closed, I doggedly went on com–
posing. My medium happened to be Russian but could have been
just as well Basic English or Volapiik. The kind of poem I produced
in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being
alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain
intense human emotions.
It
was a phenomenon of orientation, rather
than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or
to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.
But then, in a sense, all poetry
is
positional: to try to express
