MAZE WITHOUT A MINOTAUR

If we could only push these walls

apart, unfold the room the way

a child might take apart a box

and lay it flat upon the floor—

so many corners cleared at last!

Or else could rip away the roof

and stare down at the dirty rooms,

the hallways turning on themselves,

and understand at last their plan—

dark maze without a minotaur,

no monsters but ourselves.

Yet who

could bear to see it all? The slow

descending spirals of the dust

against the spotted windowpane,

the sunlight on the yellow lace,

the hoarded wine turned dark and sour,

the photographs, the letters—all

the crowded closets of the heart.

One wants to turn away—and cry

for fire to break out on the stairs

and raze each suffocating room.

But the walls stay, the roof remains

strong and immovable, and we

can only pray that if these rooms

have memories, they are not ours.

WORDS

The world does not need words. It articulates itself

in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path

are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.

The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.

The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other—

illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.

Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands

glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow

arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot

name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.

To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—

metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa

carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,

painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving

each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.

The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always—

greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

INTERROGATIONS AT NOON

Just before noon I often hear a voice,

Cool and insistent, whispering in my head.

It is the better man I might have been,

Who chronicles the life I’ve never led.

He cannot understand what grim mistake

Granted me life but left him still unborn.

He views his wayward brother with regret

And hardly bothers to disguise his scorn.

“Who is the person you pretend to be?”

He asks, “The failed saint, the simpering bore,

The pale connoisseur of spent desire,

The half-hearted hermit eyeing the door?

“You cultivate confusion like a rose

In watery lies too weak to be untrue,

And play the minor figures in the pageant,

Extravagant and empty, that is you.”

ENTRANCE

Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight,

Out of the room that lets you feel secure.

Infinity is open to your sight.

Whoever you are.