Subject
James Laughlin poem on VN
From
Date
Body
Laughlin, James, 1914-:The Moths [from The Man in the Wall (1993), New Directions]
Remembering Vladimir Nabokov
1 A dark damp night and a sudden hatch
2 of moths has covered the glass of the
3 big window in the living room attract-
4 ed by the light where I sit reading
5 they make a solid curtain of flutter-
6 ing little shapes they are desperate
7 they are the kind which only lives for
8 one night and they must reach the light
9 there must be thousands of them there
10 is nothing remarkable in this invasion
11 no metaphor for the poet to play with
12 but now again it is a night some forty
13 years ago the summer when Volya came
14 to hunt lepidoptera at the mountain
15 lodge in Utah he had turned the inside
16 lights against the picture window and
17 the outside was swarming with moths
18 he put on a miner's headlamp and stood
19 on a stepladder on the terrace plucking
20 the moths into a cyanide jar with his
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21 tweezers next morning when he examin-
22 ed the bodies with a jeweler's ocular
23 he was ecstatic eleven of the male
24 moths were the variants (detectable by
25 a mutation in the genitalia) which were
26 first recorded by the French lepidopter-
27 ologist D'Imbert when he visited the
28 Wasatch range in 1896 later Volya told
29 me that he traded his duplicates with
30 collectors in Europe for varieties from
31 Manchuria & Tibet that he had never seen.
