FIRST POEM
893
impressed on my brain like some pillow crease on a sleeper's flesh,
I did not doubt that my mother would greet my achievement with
glad tears of pride. The possibility of her being much too engrossed,
that particular night, in other events to listen to verse did not enter
my mind at all. Never in my life had I craved more for her praise.
Never had I been more vulnerable. My nerves were on edge because
of the darkness of the earth which I had not noticed muffling itself
up, and the nakedness of the firmament, the disrobing of which I had
not noticed either. Overhead, between the formless trees bordering
my dissolving path, the night sky was pale with stars. In those years,
that marvelous mess of constellations, nebulae and interstellar gaps
provoked in me an indescribable sense of nausea, of utter panic, as
if I were hanging from earth upside down on the brink of infinite
space, with terrestrial gravity still holding me by the heels but about
to release me any moment.
Except for two corner windows on the upper storey (my mother's
sitting room), the house was already dark. The night watchman let
me in, and slowly, carefully, so as not to disturb the arrangement of
words in my aching head, I mounted the stairs. My mother reclined
on the sofa with the
Reck
(the St. Petersburg daily my father
published) and .an unopened
London Times
in per lap. A white
telephone gleamed on the glass-topped table near her. Late as it was,
she still kept expecting my father to call from St. Petersburg where
he was being detained by the tension of approaching war. An arm–
chair stood by the sofa but I avoided it because of its glossy golden
satin, the mere sight of which caused a laciniate shiver to branch
from my spine like nocturnal lightning. With a little cough, I sat
down on a footstool and started my recitation. While thus engaged,
I kept staring at the farther wall, upon which I see so clearly in
retrospection some small daguerreotypes and silhouettes in oval frames,
a Somov aquarelle (young birchtrees, the half of a rainbow--every–
thing very melting and moist), a splendid Versailles autumn by Alex–
ander Benois and a crayon drawing my mother's mother had made in
her girlhood-that park pavilion again with its pretty windows partly
screened by linked branches.
As
my memory hesitated for a moment on the threshold of the
last stanza, where so many opening words had been tried that the
finally selected one was now somewhat camouflaged by an array of
