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   top of page  other sonnets  shorter poems  longer poems               e-mail to Mike  Fox Paws home page