VLADIMIR NABOKOV
up from behind the rail; I and the headsman
were swaying, struggling on the platform's edge .
A crackling- and the heat breathed on my face,
the hand that had been clutching me relaxed,
I fell somewhere, knocked someone down, I dove,
I slid, amid torrents of smoke, into
a storm of rearing steeds and running people–
"Fire! Fire!" the cry vibrated over and over,
choking with sobs of joy, with boundless bliss!
But I was far away by then! Just once
I looked back, on the run, and saw the crimson
smoke billowing into a vault of black,
the uprights bursting into flames themselves,
the blade come crashing down, set free by fire!
Wife
How dreadful!
Husband
forget . . .
The night,
its hook-
Passerby
Yes, when you've seen death you don't
One time some thieves got in the garden.
the darkness, fright. . . . I got my gun off
(interrupting, lost in thought)
-Thus I escaped, and suddenly
it seemed my eyes were opened: I'd been awkward,
unfeeling, absent-minded, had not fully
appreciated life, the colored specks of
our precious life- but, having seen so close
that pair of upright posts, that narrow gate
to nonexistence, and those gleams, that gloom.
Amid the whistle of sea winds I fled
from France, and kept avoiding France so long
as over her the icy Robespierre
loomed like a greenish incubus, so long
as dusty armies marched into the gunfire
spurred by the Corsican's gray gaze and forelock .
But life was hard for me in foreign countries.
In dank and melancholy London I
gave lessons in the science of duelling. I
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