Nabokov’s Blues lyrics

The wallful of quoted passages from his work,
with the requisite specimens pinned next
to their literary cameo appearances, was too good

a temptation to resist, and if the curator couldn’t,
why should we? The prose dipped and shimmered
and the “flies,” as I heard a buff call them, stood

at lurid attention on their pins. If you love to read
and look, you could be happy a month in that small
room. One of the Nabokov photos I’d never seen:

he’s writing (left-handed! why did I never trouble
to find out?) at his stand-up desk in the hotel
apartment in Montreux. The picture’s mostly

of his back and the small wedge of face that shows
brims with indifference to anything not on the page.
The window’s shut. A tiny lamp trails a veil of light

over the page, too far away for us to read.
We also liked the chest of specimen drawers
labeled, as if for apprentice Freudians,

“Genitalia,” wherein languished in phials
the thousands he examined for his monograph
on the Lycaenidae, the silver-studded Blues.