Dom Casmurro's Sonnet

"Oh flower of heaven! Oh, flower chaste and pure!"

"Though life be lost the battle still is won!"
(Or is it the other way round?
I never could remember...)
But who is the flower?
Why, it is Capitu of course.
Or is it justice? Is it love?
Is it virtue? Or poetry itself?
Or is it you Bentinho?
Folding quietly into fruit,
and withering,
as time demands,
in the hour of our judgement?
I remember once, long ago,
you tried to write your destiny in the sand,
(that too had been a sonnet
of only two lines),
but she had told you then to put the stick away,
and you always did as you were told.

Oh Capitu! Oh virtue! Oh eyes,
oblique and sly, that wander!

(Maybe at this point
the reader could do me the service,
of deciding if the ideas presented thus far
have helped to dictate the pattern of the verse, or if,
vice versa, so to speak,
the verse has generated the ideas?)

You see, I already have the key,
it is here, golden, in my hand,
but in my haste I forgot to find a door
or a lock to put it in.

Perhaps only God and Jose Dias,
will ever know the answer,

but while you're there, dear reader,
maybe you could be the one who tells me;
why it is that dreams dissolve,
at the slightest opening of an eye?