<p>417. A DISCOVERY
<a l:href="#c_446"><sup>{*}</sup></a></p>I found it in a legendary landall rocks and lavender and tufted grass,where it was settled on some sodden sandhard by the torrent of a mountain pass.The features it combines mark it as newto science: shape and shade — the special tinge,akin to moonlight, tempering its blue,the dingy underside, the checquered fringe.My needles have teased our its sculptured sex;corroded tissues could no longer hidethat priceless mote now dimpling the convexand limpid teardrop on a lighted slide.Smoothly a screw is turned; our of the misttwo ambered hooks symmetrically slope,or scales like battledores of amethystcross the charmed circle of the microscope.I found it and I named it, being versedin taxonomic Latin; thus becamegodfather to an insect and its firstdescriber — and I want no other fame.Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),and safe from creeping relatives and rust,in the secluded stronghold where we keeptype specimens it will transcend its dust.Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,poems that take a thousand years to diebut ape the immortality of thisred label on a little butterfly.<12 января> 1943<p>418. THE POEM
<a l:href="#c_447"><sup>{*}</sup></a></p>Not the sunset poem you make when you think aloud,with its linden tree in India inkand the telegraph wires across its pink cloud;not the mirror in you and her delicate bareshoulder 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 thoseevening 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 stonedeep 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 birdsfuse and form a silent, intense,mimetic pattern of perfect sense.<10 июня> 1944
