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An Audience of One
Our terrier lies curled up on his lap.
He reads from the computer screen:
Shared behavioral pathways.
He shuffles notes in hand. Clicks.
Up comes another page:
Dynamics of mass action.
More shuffling. Hesitancy.
Over his shoulder I watch
as he scrolls quickly through a year’s work
blurring texts and images until a circle of lines appears.
He clicks on this. Immediately the lines begin to glow,
pulsing as if blood surges through them. They divide
and divide again. I try to see through this luminous tangle
to the code within: to the scaffold of algorithms and equations
but fail to hold the abstraction
before a Gothic wreath, gnarled and leaf-bare,
suggests itself.
Last year he showed these animations.
A handful of our friends turned up at the gallery.
We downed black vodka, surrounded
by free-loading undergraduates.
He shifts his balance. Our dog adjusts.
One thing unravels another.
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