—part I of The Labyrinth
Come see what we have wrought How blindness veils
as if a shouldered hand affirming love
The darkling comfort of a well-trod path
that eases through the open door and down
the hallway to the bookshelf strained with rows
of foreign mountaintops and children’s heads
in glossy frames A caryatid hacked
to tourist scale and bargained down by half
A crystalline decanter topped with rum
Displays of polished pocket watches set
on velvet Case fronts open so the gears
can whir observed The second hands in fear-
some lock
A pageantry of absences
An abscess gnawing at the mandible
You saw us clearly Milton Centered Man
as flawed in argument and temperament
yet mirrored in divinity A half-
breed mongrel caught between creator &
expelled and bound to fall How easily
we’re swayed to sin To vanity To vice
How often idols rise in silvered lakes
as witness to inverted truth The eye
compensed by nothing less than symmetry
A zoetrope that spins a static eye
to witness how the light creates itself
The deathwatch beetles ticking in the beams
above the body
This the scope To fall
and in the failing rise But first to blet
the medlar Rot the pithy meat into
accountability Give up a tithe
commensurate to what was grifted
Mark
how readily the teeth break through the skin
to macerate the apple after all
The meat a perfect crispness Ripe and wet
The sugared bolus languid in the throat
The chin a froth of coital genesis
as if design intended it The seed
too necessary to allow it not
to be begot The consequence of loss
a pointless narrative of love and joy
devoid of relativity and so
banal An egg that clogs the oviduct
A tree that drops ungathered fruits to rot
and so remains incessant
Counterweight
however is to name the weeds To watch
them creep the fence and suck the harvest soil
To let the ivy pry the mortar Wedge
a tendril in the dry stack wall and force
it slowly down To let the stamen jut
erect and fill the void with seed A haze
of viscid probity that coats the lungs
and batters uncontrollable among
the moistened pistils Fields of rye and rape-
seed profligate
But Milton you ascribed
how Man could grace his Maker even so
Debated that the ruddy soul can still
be cleansed That even in the throes of sin
and bedlam lies salvation That mankind
in contemplative conversation with
himself could still encounter mercy Still
redeem the whole in fractional requests
A constant pruning back of overgrowth
for praise
& Lo the cormorant doth perch
atop the Tree of Life and cry at how
ingrained and normalized it newly is
to be inhuman in the name of faith
or hope or love At how the fissures spread
along expected arbitrary lines
that overlap and further tesselate
until the only join is dissonance
At the inelegance in certainty
that single answers can suffice to mend
the ruptures At the multiplicity
of single answers
Cries in other words
at how the broken mirrors stumble out
between the oak and linden Past the walls
and through the gate into the bleary-eyed
beyond to find no center Nothing left
to orient the self but formless void
and so diminished build the larger walls
that keep the self protected at the price
of isolation Agonism as
recurrent loop So self-sustained the scene
transmogrified The myth revealed to all
as not a garden but a Labyrinth
