Cryptanalysis of the Enigma

for Alan Turing

 

1.

there are things about myself I cannot decode

here I am in the tube, Croxley, Watford, at the end

of the line

here I am at the cinema, the reels rotating too fast

the audience sees him enter the bedroom, wipe a tear off her cheek

a deep kiss

I can hear the wheels turning

I want to see each frame, to analyze each movement that brought them here – somewhere

on a dusty shelf in a cinema in a dream is the reel of my life

here I am under the lamp, clamping down the film, cutting and splicing

the piece I want to show you is a very small piece of the whole

I will tell you when it’s done

 

2.

inside each of my cells is a double helical polyalphabetic cipher

which is to say the enigma is inside me

which is to say the enigma is inside me like god

which is to say like god the enigma is inside me

like inside me is a tesseract, intractable

 

this is hard to explain

 

3.

the world is full of adversaries

like rolodexes of shifting characters

wired to rotate when you touch them

to output a different signal every time

 

when I saw him outside the cinema

it was like perfect logic, like winning a war

taking him home

circuitry synched, looking under the doormat of god

and finding a master key

all our pins tumbling over together

 

it was a pleasure, my complete undoing

 

4.

there are things about myself I cannot decode

here I am, poison on my tongue, the deep sleep

dreams of the tesseract, the enigma, the god

still alive inside me, all rotor rings and notches

all spinning, slowing down

here I am at the controls playing back snatches of signal

from a wire sound asleep on the ocean floor

 

there were small pieces

I wanted you

to see

—

Jack McGavick is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where he studied English and secondary education. He has taught both fiction and poetry at the Young Writers Workshop at Sweet Briar College (formerly at UVa). He currently lives in Austin, TX, where he teaches English and social studies at American YouthWorks, a dropout recovery charter school.