Man in the Maze

Here's a reworked way old poem to celebrate over [allegedly] 10,000 page views of poems that have appeared on this here Rabbit's Gone Missing over the past years. (Which is cool but scary because we *know* lots of those views are courtesy of our spammer frenz around the world. *wink*) 

Apologies for posting so rarely for so long. Cheers to all, especially all who actually read...and even more to whomever actually finds something to enjoy, whether written by me or by those wonderfully alive mystics in South/West Asia whose words we English-speakers have only attempted to translate into our own world of language. Next up: Rabi'a (Al-Basra). Look her up!

John Singer Sargent :sketches

[a word from the muse]

Fate is not the architect. Fate is for 
weak gods and bad storytellers. Which 

is why you’re so enraged with this 
inaction, this gliding track, this resigned

fall from the skyscraper

Which has no builder, no path, no root 
language of travel. So who’s your enemy 

now? You’ve been set up, maybe; 

you’re both double agents, you and 

fate, more in love with what can 
never be when what is still forms

Collage that we are here for.

The mystery we keep unfolding
and folding into birds of prey that,

at rest, fit over one another into a rebuilt
umbilical cord that keeps saying we're

always home. While always lost.


Which is why what we will make is still
mystery to me. From which I am drawn,

made, drawn


From so many smoldering ash-stricken
remains of what was once forest, hill, home

mansion deer bone burial mound past lives
in all the ephemera that gave and hid life and

death and life and—


So it’s a heavy load, sleeping while this 
castle’s built out of thin air, the lion 

drinking dry the lake lap 
by patient lap because 

your spoon was inadequate

As all the nights you’ve fought back 
against the tide and the sand, your back 

to my hot frozen form always there 

shadowing silhouette but never quite 

touching

What is so much bigger than you. You 

have no idea, you've no ideas,               you have 


More than a conspiracy, more than plans 
to take over the world; the idea is about you 

walking from here to there, getting into 
your car, choosing not to kiss, getting out 

to kiss; 
thinking, 

not speaking. 

Speaking and thinking

It will become beauty again

Your junkyard heap and flow of perfect 
juxtaposition of every surface you believe in, 

I love it all

Like those green turns of the circuit

board pulled from a jagged slum dump—all 

its silver circles and minute black holes, its 
curves and symmetry, its convergence and 

imbalance—soon 

to be made new and become 

even beauty 
again.  

Exacting.  A 

galaxy unto itself

And the circle maze hidden in the 
blanket, the basket, the locked box

that's mystery yet line-carved into a single 
woven point, its lines moving with you, 

seamless, 

no real detour 


needed. Yet it will take your whole 
life to travel, whole, beyond the linear

fall of dominos, walls only now 
we escape. Only now


We create.

The Hunter, the dark woods, & the dénouement

Ela Zubrowska : color is on flowers

And so your enemy 
stalks you. 

You thirst, you 
stumble; wonder if this heavy 
quilt of night will suffocate or free;

if wilderness conspires 
to make you know how small 
you truly are. Or how infinite. How 
frail. How alive. 

Ancient as this deer run.
      

                                         the drum, the heartbeat, the breath, the warcry
                        the breath, 
          the drum, 
                      the heartbeat, 
                                  the warcry


So now become the seeker.

Turn into the hunter.

Turn around and charge after

what's chasing you down, run with

dark blades emerging from your fear

to stop in the air and turn the other way,

poised to strike as your strange new weapon.


                      the drum, the heartbeat, the breath, the warcry
                                                       the breath, 
                                           the drum, 
                           the heartbeat, 
                the warcry

And then 
when you decide 
you're ready to die,

you'll see the bullet 
as it stops,

blooms, and pulses light, quiet

battle song pouring out of this nexus 

of unseen power encircling you—

                                  the breath
                                   the drum 
                                the heartbeat 
                                  the warcry
The drum, the heartbeat, the breath, the warcry

and here, in your 
near-death, your rebirth by
blood and dirt and hunger and butchered fear

you'll find out who you really 
are. It can't be done

any other way.

What would the past say?

Cliff Grego : Study in Pizzicato .

It would say that it
does not mock you.

The past is always sober
in its gaze. The past would

say that you have lived, that you
never knew how many trees were

planted in your honor. It would say that
your backbreaking work was thwarted only 

as in a Noh play, as in a surface war; air between
the motions of force set against you, your fight what

built your muscles into grace that became dance that became
a sword that cut precisely. That could winnow the grain in a single

motion, that could slice a mountain from top to hollow and send its
halves rolling into the sea. It would say that even now you are unaware

of how you appear to the unseen world, how the arc of your life is pages,
pages longer than any schedule you had mapped out, any diary of your failure.

It would tell you things you know nothing about; it would bring up the precious
scrolls in jars you left in caves and ran from. The past would say it knows you

better than you begin to imagine you know it. It would trace those lines on
your body with a blinding needle till you saw pictures emerge that would

throttle your regret without mercy. It would call you out—crescendo
of beats rising with the tension—and you’d have nothing left to

say so that you’d finally hear the single string plucked that
would give the answer for you. It would tell you what

was stored in caverns as you squandered your
poverty, thinking it gold you threw away. It

would say, raising its voice, that it does
not know what you’re talking about

when you say waste. It would say
it cannot feel sorry for you, you

who rides the wind without
knowing your own wings.

Witness

Tree who catches

every sunrise and sunset in your boughs

you have been my closest friend, the

witness of this story, too short and far

too long to yet tell me its meaning.

You have heard it all. The scream of the train

every time it crushes the land west where I

cannot go but have reached for all this time,

the way you reach. Unmoving and traveling

all the way to the ends of the fleeing universe.

The silence, crushing silence between

there and here. Only you would know.

You have opened yourself to

the dance of the smoke of every

smoldering prayer I burn here beneath

you. Witnessed every ceremony between

me and the sun that abandons me

right after I give my heart to it again.

And again you make me trust

by the force of saying nothing,

by the force of being, by the force

of your unseen movement in the night,

underground, in every one of the

directions, knowing you could cover

the whole world if enough time went by.

You pull me into your hidden rings

one by one until I see the substance

of every year of desperate survival,

the truth of what all forget but you.

You live and die and resurrect

and survive unnoticed, sure of what

you hold, what sap has gone deep in

your veins, forced by the sudden cold.

With a great crack

you thrown down your soul

in each limb that surrenders

to lightning, showing me

you are broken too, and nothing

can rob you of beauty that is.

You are young, you assure me,

you will die soon enough, you tell me,

you will live forever and you still

know nothing, you say—

You are just as alone as I am,

I say, unbelieving, as unknown, as

solitary and confined to your own unseen

movement, as powerless to change

the elements you brave.

Yet I know I'm wrong

every time I sit near you, every time

I lie beneath your great sheltering body

to watch the bright planets and muted stars

we know have been assigned to be seen

by us alone, from this exacting

city plot of earth.

I know you're telling me

what I don't want to hear,

the lavish questions to my questions,

the hope that drags me back

into this strange arena with nothing

to fight with but gnarled fists.

You force me to sing with you

every time the wind rises

in our midst.

Breathe on this sleeping fire

Dean's Blue Hole .

When you walk out the door,

all the spirits of the invisible world

gather around you like a great cloak

that flows back to your beginning.

You walk away

but they do not.

They love you because

you were a knit-together marvel from the first;

they heard of your miraculous frame

growing around you in your mother

and sent gifts to feed you

as you became yourself.

You leave the book of your days behind

yet its words rise up in your absence

and tell the story you can't see anymore.

They call forth phantom thoughts

to lay themselves down on the page

and wait for you to want them again.

You abandon desire

yet desire lives

in this host that surrounds you

and fights for you

even as you slumber in your tent.

You thought you let it go at the edge of that cliff,

yet it swam the river below

and tracked you day and night

and even now,

lays merciful traps in your path.

It shadows your escape boat across the sea,

lulling storms to sleep and singing them awake

so you might see the wind and the waves

and know how alive you are

and how always close to death.

You abandon the reflection of 
your own reflection, yet 
still you are seen.

Still you are known

by every last creature who's crossed your path,

every invisible path of lightwaves

that have touched your shifting face

day after mist-burned day;

by every symbol or portent

you forgot upon waking.

Creation speaks for you

even when you think you 
have nothing to say.

And all heaven plunges its oars

into the water

that carries you home,

to the place from which you exiled yourself

but that never gave up

waiting for your return.

So when you finally hit the wall

you can't walk through,

go back to the tracks left behind you.

Let the wet soil embrace 
your backwards steps,

let your body be drawn.

Go back to your

hidden country.

If you face south,

head north.

If you ran east,

let the west wind pull you back

with cords of lovingkindness.

Go back to the dark

heart of this mountain,

where you once searched

for gold and riddles and hidden springs.

Go back to the cave

where your heart still lives

and take it back.

Stand back and see

this cave as it is,

this vast cave in the heart of God.

Say the true names of things again,

knowing what is—

not idea or form or creed or mantra—

just the name that is—

and breathe again.

You named these things;

these things named you.

You have always been seen.

You have always been known.

With the cold comes other gifts

All summer I longed to lie on the grass

and watch the stars. But each time I tried

the earth shook and cracked and swallowed

cities. Hordes of locust came and razed every

living thing to the ground. Fires erupted in the

root balls of my favorite trees and torched the

low-hanging sky edge of the city. And spread to

the hills, ringing the land with fleeing citizens.

The oceans spiraled down latent drains and

poor creatures of peace lay flopping on

exposed underwater mountain ranges,

even. Disaster became my old waking

word and drowning towns I could

not save, my nightmare.

And you, in the middle of it all

still slept. In your cave. Waiting to

transform but not knowing it. I called to

you from across the deserts and burning forests,

the swamps and broken-down roads full of stranded

refugees. You heard me once but thought it was a dream,

only a dream. And did not walk into that dreamtime, that

bridge to the other world where you are a citizen and a tracker

and a king and a farmer each day. I waited for you there, still

longing to lay down and look up. I sat and stared into the

west expanse as the sun dropped each end of the

shortening days. I feared the next ice age, as my

bones were already prophesying doom. I longed

to look up. And still you slept. And dreamed

without believing, thinking dreaming as

being stopped life, life without

consequence, life without

acknowledgement.

Without anything to show.

Your shaggy coat fell and then

grew supple and your heart beat slow,

storing energy for another time. And I was

alone. But then the first freeze came and the

world stopped burning. Overnight its raiders died

in confusion, plunging their swords into each other's

hearts. I ran into the field where the spoils were, and

gathered the stolen plunder of the past three hundred

years, hearing each bolt of cloth, each golden earring

calling out for its original home, longing to return to

belonging. And I looked for the blanket you once

wrapped me in, woven with your own hands over

summer with fibers of many colors. And there 
it was, spread on the grass under blazing stars,

remembering me, and I lay down in its arms,

alone, with nothing but silence and darkness

around me, loyal as my closest friend.

Escape Artist in Reverse

Royce Bair : Iron Rod Art

The landscape you run from is not desert, not blue hills, not
jail cell, not electric barbed-wire fence; it is within. Where your 

hunger brawls at night, paper for supper doing nothing but make you
dream of tractors that fly, helicopters digging tunnels to China. Or


the other side of the Black Plague, where the sick get well in droves.
It is where you don’t want to go. Where your father fails to come home


again, take you fishing, watch you say three lines in the school play,
make you put on socks before you put your cowboy boots on. It’s where


fire smolders tire rubber in the barn, where someone you love presses a
gun barrel to the vein on your temple, pulsing syncopated heartbeat.


You have to go there. There is no parole till you do.

And when you finally decide to do the fast, to let God be your mother’s
brother who takes you to the wilderness to wait for the vision that will


name you, you’ll still want to run. But this time your hunger will be
the merciful handcuffs with the lock you can’t pick, the prison jumpsuit


you can’t slip out from—if only because it wants you to live. Your heart
will grow legs instead and take you, plodding, even, to the center of that


black hole that whirrs in a roar, as it did in your mother’s womb, when
you first thought to steal in order to live. And if you do fall—relinquish


to gravity with tears and loud cries like those of the Son of Man.

You’ll finally see around you the translucent house you live in that
flies silent over the city in the hills, where your true home hides from


you now in its shyness. Your thirst will wrap its arms around you in a 

fragrant braid of safety, risk, and safety you can never escape—till you 

drink what you think is a mirage of water guarded by a desert 

lion. Your healing’s on the other side of time, that is to say, now.

Now to make sure every drop of this bitter water’s not wasted,
the poison brine making alchemy in the maze of your intestines.  

It will be your oldest sorrow that covers you till this sandstorm, 

otherwise deadly, passes over in a terrible shifting of terrain. 

It will be your oldest pain that rocks you to sleep, this dark night 

no blazing rock in the sky reaches out to turn the waterfall gold.

When you wake in the holy morning, mist evaporating from your 
strange, beloved hand—you'll find it’s your skin that's gold and new.

The Last of the Basketweavers in the Last of the Wetlands

When you go to gather the grasses,

you better listen to what they’re saying.

To you.

It could be: wait, wait, wait, wait.

Better to burn us. Harvest the new shoots.

Watch for a brushfire.

Or: You are the keeper of worlds.

You are the creator of thresholds.

You are to weave us into intricate keyholes

no one but the wily will see.

Even: We wish we could use your strange heart 
as a form to wend around instead of the whiskey 
bottle your grandfather left. We wish your fingers felt

more in their nerve endings. We wish you

felt less before splitting us in threes.

We wish you sang like you once did.

And yes, then you can sing your low register

track over the bridge that holds all the sweetness,

all the power of a moment of water beneath it.

Not everything you look for will hear you.
But the one that recognizes the unrepeatable timbre,

the fingerprint in the air, the underbelly of

a molecule’s frame—this is how you will be drawn.

Not to the strands, but to the final shape, the

lovely curve you will be the first to discover

in this medium; 

the interlock of age and use

and color that never touched 
before you thought

them into movement.