Vladimir Nabokov

 

Behind his words and wiles and smiles,

his pulsing art: a paradigm,

a chrysalis, a key, a wild

soaring spiral out of time

and into a torrent of consciousness,

beyond the reach of death and darkness.

I feel the echoes of your themes,

they swell to blissful harmonies . . .

we trace the texture of your words

and make our own another's mind.

Years can melt to moments, wind

themselves around again. I heard

a window open in the dark

and felt the laughing gust of art.

 

 

© Michael Fleming

Princeton, New Jersey

April 1980

 

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