― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature
― Vladimir Nabokov
Sometimes I need to motivate myself by demanding more than I think I can deliver.
― Vladimir Nabokov
For example, from about 2004 to 2008, I worked on a series of poems titled, "Falling Bodies: A Pseudo-Scientific Approach to Love." Each of the poems, about 60 of them I think, used some aspect of science to examine the mysteries of love. My hope was that I would publish them in a book of some kind. But when my manuscript was repeatedly rejected, I began submitting them individually, and they have now all been published. Here is an example of one of the first poems in the series:
ACTS OF GOD AND OTHER MYSTERIES
(previously published in Clockwise Cat)
I smoke cigars now,
but only once a month,
and I no longer eat meat at all.
I still carry my arousal around
like a succulent fruit
in a semi-permeable pouch
just south of my solar plexus,
and I think of you when it rains
like it rained today.
I don’t spend much time
binding or unbinding my hair,
or enough time combing it
to cause even a small
thunderstorm.
I have found myself
strangely alone
and craving lightning.
Your going has left an emptiness in me
bigger than my original self
and I have denied words
until they no longer spill down my arms.
I write now in shorthand, disabled
and unwilling to transcribe the details.
Let the leaves fall.
Let them say she was taken
on a Friday, full-faced
and plastered on the cover,
no sense denying the truth.
Let them say she could twirl
like a leaf weighted down by her stem.
“Did you see how she fell?”
Like a soft, Sunday paper, still folded,
predetermined as a morning crepe myrtle
still loaded with dew. Still looking for wholes,
as vulnerable and transparent as a grape,
let them say she was seedless,
and without wings.