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  • The Composer’s Coda(Ludwig van B.)
  • Rita Dove

  I wanted fame. I wanted love.   I deserved bliss but bliss   scares easily.

  I fled Bonn’s dreary terrain   for Vienna’s grave lilt:   There I learned to cherish   even the gaps, the static.

  Fame became moot;    love, a strategy.

  Beauty was what I couldn’t seem   to hang on to. Beauty would   discharge her blandishments,   then retreat to observe the effect.

  Now I know none of this is real.   None of this exists.   That next moment,   shimmering before you? Wink—

  and it will either astonish you    or be gone. back to Saxony, so his mother can do the sorting. First, though,

there’s the small matter of this approaching tribunal, Pater, Meister, and Youngblood— my petit terror smiling up at me, caught in the thrall [End Page 692]

of his bright brown ignorance. Master Haydn reaches down to cup the rough head, murmurs: There’s musicin here.

Ach, is that so? Then, by your Lordship’s grace and the sacred lyre of Apollo, lets squeeze it out of him! [End Page 693]

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