Subject
Fw: Lasdan VN poem
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Date
Body
Lasdun, James:Plague Years [from Woman Police Officer in Elevator (1997), Norton]
"There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world, a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic."
---Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory
1 Sore throat, persistent cough ... The campus doctor
2 Tells me "just to be safe" to take the test.
3 The clinic protocol seems to insist
4 On an ironic calm. I hold my fear.
5 He draws a vial of blood for the City Lab,
6 I have to take it there, but first I teach
7 A class on Nabokov. Midway I reach
8 Into my bag for Speak Memory, and grab
9 The hot bright vial instead. I seem at once
10 Wrenched from the quizzical faces of my class
11 Into some silent anteroom of hell:
12 The "delicate meeting place"; I feel it pounce;
13 Terror---my life impacted in the glass
14 My death enormous in its scarlet grail.
