I have no need, for my nocturnal travels,
of ships, I have no need of trains.
The moon’s above the checkerboard-like garden.
The window’s open. I am set.
— V. Nabokov

I have no need, for my nocturnal travels,
of ships, I have no need of trains.
The moon’s above the checkerboard-like garden.
The window’s open. I am set.
— V. Nabokov

Wine hums, lanterns flicker.
Moon sneers, time falls into dust.
Who stitches sorrow in the dimming light,
While night is still young.

Not quite a bed, not quite a bench.
Wallpaper: a grim yellow.
A pair of chairs. A squinty looking-glass.
We enter — my shadow and I.
— V. Nabokov

Tipsy antiquity, barely holds
the coolness of the gleam.
Time lingers,
soft as the evening’s breath.

in that townlet in the towers’ shadow
the sound of life was reckless clatter,
the mixture of tipsy antiquity
and of the present liveliness
were healthful for me: my soul’s ready
to relish everything beneath the moon,
the ancient and the new.
— V. Nabokov

We so firmly believed in the linkage of life,
but now I’ve looked back — and it is astonishing
to what a degree you, my youth,
seem in tints not mine, in traits not real.
— V. Nabokov

Memory creeps like moss along the wall.
I stand in the hollow alley,
recalling her voice
only to hear
the murmur of my own shadow

Let us fold the wings of our visions.
It’s night. Buildings, all angular, on each other
topple. Shadows are fractured.
The street lamp is a broken flame.
— Vladmir Nabokov

The castle, the river, murmur the stillness;
The grass, the trees, deepen the green haze;
Birds lift, never quite ready for parting.

In the quiet pavilion, the sky is clear,
the night holds its breath.
Spider silk gleams,
incense spirals
lovers’ stars meet—
I lean back, watching the moonlight drift
through the paulownia shade.
Time slips soft into dark.
