The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Steven Reese
In Translation
Instead of wings say you bring only your bull head to the labyrinth, beating it against the wall’s inscriptions. Then someone hands you the thread, the clue to teasing their meanings out. How glaring those passages now, how they sting the mind’s eye like sun off a sea you’ve never seen on the wall’s other side. The Minotaur, Stuck in His Head Again
and finding no thread yet to follow back into the world, waits— as he’s learned to do, this being a bull’s head, after all, insistent, not to be dodged or hurried. He waits for the voices crowding that space with their doubts, their denigrations, crying him down, calling him out, waits for them to build and echo, to talk over and turn into each other until they become a single noise, one mass, a drone, a hum, and at last a tone. And that tone is his thread. It summons his senses to choir, cues his body to stir, to stride, and he becomes a time kept, a rhythm again, tuned to the light’s changes, the season’s, balanced but spinning through space on the ground he’s crossing, the voices all coming from outside, surrounding him, very few human, but all like his now, singing. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |