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Vladimir Nabokov

The Man of To-morrow’s Lament

(1942)
 
I have to wear these glasses – otherwise,
when I caress her with my super-eyes,
her lungs and liver are too plainly seen
throbbing, like deep-sea creatures, in between
dim bones. Oh, I am sick of loitering here,
a banished trunk (like my namesake in “Lear”),
but when I switch to tights, still less I prize
my splendid torso, my tremendous thighs,
the dark-blue forelock on my narrow brow,

...

[2/5]

...

the heavy jaw; for I shall tell you now
my fatal limitation … not the pact
between the worlds of Fantasy and Fact
which makes me shun such an attractive spot
as Berchtesgaden, say; and also not
that little business of my draft; but worse:
a tragic misadjustment and a curse.

...

[3/5]

...

I’m young and bursting with prodigious sap,
and I’m in love like any healthy chap –
and I must throttle my dynamic heart
for marriage would be murder on my part,
an earthquake, wrecking on the night of nights
a woman’s life, some palmtrees, all the lights,
the big hotel, a smaller one next door
and half a dozen army trucks – or more.

...

[4/5]

...

But even if that blast of love should spare
her fragile frame – what children would she bear?
What monstrous babe, knocking the surgeon down,
would waddle out into the awestruck town?
When two years old he’d break the strongest chairs,
fall through the floor and terrorize the stairs;
at four, he’d dive into a well; at five,
explore a roaring furnace – and survive;

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...

and when she sighs – somewhere in Central Park
where my immense bronze statue looms – “Oh, Clark …
Isn’t he wonderful!?!”, I stare ahead
and long to be a normal guy instead.

(The New Yorker’s poetry editor Charles Pearce told Nabokov that “most of us appear to feel that many of our readers wouldn’t quite get it” and rejected to print it.)

@dirk 1942? Then this even predates Larry Niven's 1969 classic "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex"!