The Poem

Not the sunset poem you make when you think aloud, with its linden tree in India ink and the telegraph wires across its pink cloud;

not the mirror in you and her delicate bare shoulder still glimmering there; not the lyrical click of a pocket rhyme—the tiny music that tells the time;

and not the pennies and weights on those evening papers piled up in the rain; not the cacodemons of carnal pain;not the things you can say so much better in plain prose—

but the poem that hurtles from heights unknown—when you wait for the splash of the stone deep below, and grope for your pen, and then comes the shiver, and then—

in the tangle of sounds, the leopards of words,the leaflike insects, the eye-spotted birds fuse and form a silent, intense,mimetic pattern of perfect sense.

– Vladimir Nabokov