Every brain is on the brink

Restoration  (1952)

To think that any fool may tear
by chance the web of when and where.
O window in the dark! To think
that every brain is on the brink 
of nameless bliss no brain can bear,

unless there be no great surprise --
as when you learn to levitate
and, hardly trying, realise
-- alone, in a bright room -- that weight
is but your shadow, and you rise.

My little daughter wakes in tears:
She fancies that her bed is drawn
into a dimness which appears
to be the deep of all her fears
but which, in point of fact, is dawn.

I know a poet who can strip
a William Tell or Golden Pip
in one uninterrupted peel
miraculously to reveal
revolving on his fingertip,

a snowball. So I would unrobe,
turn inside out, pry open, probe
all matter, everything you see,
the skyline and its saddest tree,
the whole inexplicable globe,

to find the true, the ardent core
as doctors of old pictures do
when, rubbing out a distant door
or sooty curtain, they restore
the jewel of a bluish view.

--Vladimir Nabokov