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."

---[H]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.