Working Excerpts from Of Evernost: Three Poems
To walk the winding way and find the center
Is all she asks. This problem, though, she found:
To exit cannot be–how then to enter?
She loves the fountain, yes, cold shimmers lent her
By sun, but will wit bring her, dancing round,
To walk the winding way and find the center?
And, if, achieved, the center should decenter–
For all in hand is naught–her cry will sound:
“To exit cannot be–how then to enter?”
Untrusting, now, bereft of that which sent her
Happy round the turns, she still is bound
To walk the winding way and find the center.
“The truest labyrinth,” said some tormentor,
“Has one way only.” She is lost, aground:
To exit cannot be–how then to enter?
She finds, at last, the Daedalus, inventor
Of all. “I seek,” he says–does it astound–
“To walk the winding way and find the center
To exit cannot be–how then to enter?”
Untie your shoelaces–or, with great struggle, the rope around your wrists. Penelope by night. Night turns to day, caught and bound again, always. Cross the strands, loop under, pull: Tie.
Free: to steal upon the sleeping enemy and loose the prisoner’s bonds. The suitors tricked, dead. The key found and the labyrinth dissolved as if it never had been: keep your hand on the left wall, it reduces to nothing. But one puzzle leads only to a harder. Old love would devour you again, and the carnivorous vines outside the enemy camp entangle.
Divide truth from seeming, dead end from clear path, and at last from those who mean you ill. With your army, or with your senses, and with true love Unite.
Untie the winding way so that the path lies straight, the vows that held you to your company, no longer needed, the shoes–again–and then cross the strands, loop under, pull. Without a cause, without a maze, what now? So tie.
And– “Enough!” He hacks it apart. Rope litters the floor.
Perfumed passions bloom legibly in the moon’s silver veils–
whereas moonless,
you’re on your own with Nothing.
I’d like to believe
the world remains where I saw it last
but as the hours creep past
I hear it undulate,
crisscross,
crack.
Night is to Day
as is the possible to the actual
and the impossible to the possible:
I hear there are those–
post-intellects that sail harborless through contradictions
in constellations–
filthy men who do not know a hawk from a handsaw–
dreamy-eyed innocents–
who can ride the Nightmare
ten leagues beyond the wild world’s end
and achieve their heart’s desire or more.
I am not mad enough–
I fall into
dead oxymoron,
void,
vice.
I lose all.
Some say–someday–
the sun will cease to rise and set.
All will be Day,
final and complete,
until which time
the wise will cherish
every frailty, shade, and doubt–
for darkness is the glory
we must–someday–do without.
(All will be Night,
some say.)
Of Elsewhere 