Watching movies with sister

 Movie nights with my sister were a tradition between us, going back well over a decade. The unspoken rule was that they were only for us. Even at times when we hardly spent any other time together, it maintained some kind of special bond between us.

The kind of funny thing was that Naomi used to always fall asleep later in the evening. She was apparently so cozy and safe next to me that she just couldn't help herself.

It had become a point of pride for Naomi at some point that she stayed up all the way through. Perhaps she was tired of the teasing about she couldn't last until the end.

She'd regressed since then, pride failing against the stresses of adult life. I had to admit it felt nice knowing I was her refuge from it all, and that snuggling with me had returned to being a near-foolproof way of putting my sister to sleep.

A little more confusingly, Naomi had also started sucking her thumb in her sleep. I couldn't remember how long ago it had been since she'd done anything like that. But like clockwork every week now she fell asleep and sucked her thumb while cuddled up warmly against me.

I tried one week, just to see what would happen, pulling her hand gently away from her mouth. Naomi's cute face took on a slight frown in her sleep and her lips kept looking for something. If I released her hand, it would slowly return and she'd comfortably return to sucking her thumb.

Because apparently I just couldn't let something like this go, I moved Naomi's hand again and this time left my hand next to her lips. It was an even slower thing, but my sister found one of my fingers and happily sucked it into her mouth.

It was an odd feeling having my little sister sucking on my finger. Intimate in a way I wasn't sure I was comfortable with. Not with her. But she did seem happy after all, and it wasn't unpleasant, just weird.

It became something of a game for me the rest of the night. Swapping out my fingers, or putting two in at once, or withholding them a while. Just to see what Naomi would do, or if she'd wake up.

I did feel kind of bad for messing with Naomi while she was sleeping like that, but that went away when she woke up.

"Welcome back," I said.

"What?" she asked blearily.

"You fell asleep again," I teased.

"Max! I did not!" Naomi said.

I frowned slightly. "You most certainly did."

"I think I'd know," she insisted, even as she wiped drool off her cheek.

"Oh yeah?" I said. "So what happened at the end of the movie then?"

"They kissed and lived happily ever after," Naomi said promptly.

I narrowed my eyes. "Lucky guess. More detail?"

"Nuh uh," she said. "I think you were asleep. You tell me more detail."

I most definitely hadn't been asleep. The annoying thing was I'd been so busy playing with my sister that I'd been ignoring most of what had been going on in the movie.

"Um... an argument," I mumbled. "And, like, a legal thing, and a misunderstanding...."

"Wow, so convincing," Naomi said, rolling her eyes hard. "Try and stay awake next time Sleeping Beauty."

An Evening of Russian Poetry" by NABOKOV

 “…seems to be the best train. Miss Ethel Winter of the Department of English will meet you at the station and…”

            —from a letter addressed to the visiting speaker
 
The subject chosen for tonight's discussion
Is everywhere, though often incomplete:
when their basaltic banks become too steep,
most rivers use a kind of rapid Russian,
and so do children talking in their sleep.
My little helper at the magic lantern,
insert that slide and let the colored beam
project my name or any such-like phantom
in Slavic characters upon the screen.
The other way, the other way. I thank you.

On mellow hills the Greek, as you remember,
fashioned his alphabet from cranes in flight;
his arrows crossed the sunset, then the night.
Our simple skyline and a taste for timber,
the influence of hives and conifers,
reshaped the arrows and the borrowed birds.
Yes, Sylvia?

                    “Why do you speak of words
When all we want is knowledge nicely browned?”

Because all hangs together—shape and sound
heather and honey, vessel and content.
Not only rainbows—every line is bent,
and skulls and seeds and all good worlds are round,
like Russian verse, like our colossal vowels:
those painted eggs, those glossy pitcher flowers
that swallow whole a golden bumblebee
those shells that hold a thimble and the sea.
Next question.

                        “Is your prosody like ours?”

Well, Emmy, our pentameter may seem
to foreign ears as if it could not rouse
the limp iambus from its pyrrhic dream.
But close your eyes and listen to the line.
The melody unwinds; the middle word
is marvelously long and serpentine:
you hear one beat, but you have also heard
the shadow of another, then the third
touches the gong, and then the fourth one sighs.

It makes a very fascinating noise:
it opens slowly, like a grayish rose
in pedagogic films of long ago.

The rhyme is the line's birthday, as you know,
and there are certain customary twins
in Russian as in other tongues. For instance,
love automatically rhymes with blood,
nature with liberty, sadness with distance,
humane with everlasting, prince with mud,
moon with a multitude of words, but sun
and song and wind and life and death with none.

Beyond the seas where I have lost a scepter,
I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns,
soft participles coming down the steps,
treading on leaves, trailing their rustling gowns,
and liquid verbs in ahla and in ili,
Aonian grottoes, nights in the Altai,
black pools of sound with "I"s for water lilies.
The empty glass I touched is tinkling still,
but now 'tis covered by a hand and dies.

“Trees? Animals? Your favorite precious stone?”

The birch tree, Cynthia, the fir tree, Joan.
Like a small caterpillar on its thread,
my heart keeps dangling from a leaf long dead
but hanging still, and still I see the slender
white birch that stands on tiptoe in the wind,
and firs beginning where the garden ends
the evening ember glowing through their cinders.

Among the animals that haunt our verse,
that bird of bards, regale of night, comes first:
scores of locutions mimicking its throat
render its very whistling, bubbling, bursting,
flutelike or cuckoolike or ghostlike note.
But lapidary epithets are few;
we do not deal in universal rubies.
The angle and the glitter are subdued;
our riches lie concealed. We never liked
the jeweler's window in the rainy night.

My back is Argus-eyed. I live in danger.
False shadows turn to track me as I pass
and, wearing beards, disguised as secret agents,
creep in to blot the freshly written page
and read the blotter in the looking glass.
And in the dark, under my bedroom window,
until, with a chill whirr and shiver, day
presses its starter, warily they linger
or silently approach the door and ring
the bell of memory and run away.

Let me allude, before the spell is broken,
to Pushkin, rocking in his coach on long
and lonely roads: he dozed, then he awoke,
undid the collar of his traveling cloak,
and yawned, and listened to the driver's song.
Amorphous sallow bushes called rakeety,
enormous clouds above an endless plain,
songline and skyline endlessly repeated,
the smell of grass and leather in the rain.
And then the sob, the syncope (Nekrasov!)
the panting syllables that climb and climb,
obsessively repetitive and rasping,
dearer to some than any other rhyme.
And lovers meeting in a tangled garden,
dreaming of mankind, of untrammeled life,
mingling their longings in the moonlit garden,
where trees and hearts are larger than in life.
This passion for expansion you may follow
throughout our poetry. We want the mole
to be a lynx or turn into a swallow
by some sublime mutation of the soul.
But to unneeded symbols consecrated,
escorted by a vaguely infantile
path for bare feet, our roads were always fated
to lead into the silence of exile.

Had I more time tonight I would unfold
the whole amazing story—neighuklúzhe,
nevynossímo—but I have to go.

What did I say under my breath? I spoke
to a blind songbird hidden in a hat,
safe from my thumbs and from the eggs I broke
into the gibus brimming with their yolk.

And now I must remind you in conclusion,
that I am followed everywhere and that
space is collapsible, although the bounty
of memory is often incomplete:
once in a dusty place of Mora county
(half town, half desert, dump mound and mesquite)
and once in West Virginia (a muddy
red road between an orchard and a veil
of tepid rain) it came, that sudden shudder,
a Russian something that I could inhale
but could not see. Some rapid words were uttered
and then the child slept on, the door was shut.

The conjurer collects his poor belongings—
the colored handkerchief, the magic rope,
the double-bottomed rhymes, the cage, the song.
You tell him of the passes you detected.
The mystery remains intact. The check
comes forward in its smiling envelope.

“How would you say ‘delightful talk’ in Russian?”
“How would you say ‘good night’?”

                                                            Oh, that would be:

Bessónitza, tvoy vzor oonýl i stráshen;
lubóv moyá, otstóopnika prostée.

(Insomnia, your stare is dull and ashen,
my love, forgive me this apostasy.)