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Rather more baroque than not,
this life I’m examining, pleased
Enough at how pattern defeats design, memory’s eye, glancing
Off one variation after another, then the inversion, recapitulating,
Mostly, now, its own quiet splendors of movement, and that
Seems the most of it, going through these motions, only to find
How little can be repeated exactly, if only because
It repeats, and that’s the principle and privilege of memory—
A kind of aristocracy, offering patronage to the self that actually
Did all that work, selecting out the weak, wheat from the chaff,
And riffraff, a connoisseurship whose theme is whatever it takes
The theme to be. And yet, how cranky even the most pampered
Dependent can be, the artist, having painted the face of the prince
Disguised in The Marriage at Cana, begins his sketch after
The Gnostic heresies, the same potentate is now a grotesque
Demiurge, and he hides it in the score of the composer
Who shares his study, interleaved with the cantata whose notes
Encode a parody of the dinner-time praise song or a lament
For the passing of a poor, almost unnoticed dependent,
His wife. So memory unselects at best, and here I am, thinking
What was the muse was never anything but an intricacy
That admits nothing, that survives retelling as nothing
But elegance, should we believe that part of everyone’s design.
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