“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the falls azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff-and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.”
A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed--according to Nabokov's fiction--by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.