LEARNING THE CODE, CODING THE LIFE
She has come to the outskirts of the City of Limits,
a handbag full of choices swings from one shoulder,
In her hand a map of desolation, rolled up.
She has a room booked there by the day, the week,
while she follows her studies at the College of Destiny:
The entrance fee was all her childhood.
She attends lectures on Responsible Choice,
the Morality of Renunciation and its strange attraction:
Does the inverse square law apply to it, is there a
preservation of the momentum of will, the choice once made
Travels on and on throughout life until
it meets another choice?
Across the hill, from the Church of Happiness, the flat slap
of the bass drum echoes from a radio;
Her music is more classical - incestuous Sieglinde
incredulously wakens on her wall,
Carmen, histrionic high-romantic tart,
gleams sideways, hand on hip, from a poster,
The Don tots up another score of conquests: but nowhere,
in the universe of her desires, a magic flute.
* * * * *
Marked out for no story, between sheets heated only
by her own body, she dreams of another kind of speech:
Cries unuttered, compacts unavowed, the shadow words
of avoided acts: a whole grammar of futility
Is generated in her dreams.
* * * * *
After the performance, she comes upon
the Don and the Commendatore
(Their insane dialectic resolved at last)
face to face across a winebottle.
They were lovers, it seems, all along, and so
have no time for her.
This fits, she feels, the universe they predicate.
Then sees palm matched to mirrored palm
on opposite sides of the bottle:
Two singers cast apart by their music.
* * * * *
"Dear Girl," she reads, "This lust I feel ."
and closes the letter. Missives from such homely
Suburbs of the heart bore her now.
She raises her head, brushes back a fringe of hair,
looks through the window at a wilderness of stars
She is resolved to decode and define.
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