it is a beautiful poem, Robin.
i was sleeping last night, if you sleep also dave's part, i must be sleeping
someone else's lately,
let me see if i can get together today, too,
a nice one to you all, anny
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, January 03, 2003 1:26 AM
Subject: Robin's Rilke Pome ...
> 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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