FEEDING THE MINOTAUR

FEEDING THE MINOTAUR

       Un lungo errore in cieco laberinto.

             —Petrarch

                            To John Oliver Simon

This is just to say that enroute

to the emergency meeting I was crucially lost

in the philosophical distance over bilateral

distinctions between the left and the right

exits for MacArthur Blvd., on the Nimitz freeway

wondering why travel required the ghostly benediction

of five-star generals; the army vs the navy.

Mapless, having destroyed all evidence of you,

I toured the burnt stubble of the Oakland hills

(thinking I was south of the border),

searching for the lost gate to 680,

onramps to nuministic labyrinths spiraling me

through the umbilical treachery of tunnels and fault lines,

always away from the source—

and time unrolled like an angry fuse down Telegraph.

Yes, every cell in our bodies having changed,

I wondered what the lesson was this time,

until I walked in Tobey’s door to see you,

my azul minotaur; I found the arbitrary red lines

and blue highways on the funereal map of reprieve.

I’d dreamed of hunting with women

who made their home on these street corners

beneath the sign of the horned Artemis.

Blame it on the undercurrent ballistics of the Piscine moon.

I’ve held both ends of the thread long enough, ready

to flee the purgatorial darkness; your hooves

having scrawled treaties of abandonment in the dust—

enough to bury us—except for that

small, final harvest taken

before the fall.

Tender enemy, once we had no need of threads

or mapping codes. Once I fed you late apples,

we practiced flight beneath the carnelian moon

and the gates of the garden moved open.

Thousands of angelitos singing in the trees.

The Southern Cross offering us up

before the rising sun.

9/20-22/94 Fall Equinox
1995 Maverick, Terrapin issue

sometimes my notes are little poems all by themselves.