“And if the angel says: Do you know life? / Then I must say: Life devours.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
Don’t wake the monster just yet / Let me fly for a moment and trace your horizon lips.
†
June.
Another timeline without definition.
Another turn of the screw digging to no definitive grasp. Another doorway with nothing but murk in the threshold. I feel a twitch upon the thread I’ve just picked up, I’ve just looped around my fingers again.
Won’t get a makeover this time. Can’t call it a prelude, operatic, no ship sailed full of farewells, departure no great spectacle. It creeps up quietly; I pretend I don’t see it; don’t look it in the eye. This is a quiet roaming. This is a simple wading of the tide
I met a serpent on the road. He said just because you crawl on your belly doesn’t mean you have to grovel. Then slithering off, to find some other Eden, turned to rope, the one that carried me across water, into the old worn wonder of a childhood world that always holds a mirror up to this one.
But the rope is raveled open, the weight of the pendulum swing; the child drowns. Still, there lies the other land breathing, twisted across the bank. There must be other bridges which are also the heart’s escape.
In these fragmented minutes, when the first breath of the future hits, I let myself look. Do I dare to love a hope? —Something none of us knows what to do with or how to believe in. Still here it is. A sharp and shocking lift. The cold lurch of levitation. The labyrinth spawns yarn, yawns open, woven teeth. Costs, questions, dead ends, screams.
The monster in its nest of metal and mettle lifts its head. Eyelids snap back, slit burns red, sears the color of night clubs and midnight sirens; living flame and electric phantoms. I kneel in the dust of my belongings. I lift the sword from its chest. I stood before the monster before. The labyrinth lurches; the thread twitches; I fall asleep on top of my bed, with the lamp still on and the book still bent, the pen still clicked and the sentence unfinished. Wind dances with linen like the floating mantle of some divine messenger or the last breathy echo of a seer’s song, gripped by ecstatic, invisible jaws. It renders the soft, faraway din of the monster’s roar, which is also the sound of plane turbines. It carries the bitten-off sucked-back hiss of the past, which is also the let-go gasp of what is yet to come.
†
July.
I keep someone else’s keys in my pocket. I carry your stained glass at my hip as I walk to the corner market. As I walk to the corner market, I hear the tangle of riddles and hymns that looped through my heart the first time I lived here. Should we call it ostinato or motif? It doesn’t matter which, really. It all weaves in repetition. The same chorus, the same continuous back and forth rhythm of the thread running up and down the tunnels of the labyrinth. Every station holds a variation of the same person, waiting for a different train.
The parallels, the inversions slide and pop out of the landscape. I catch myself filling in the blanks on people’s faces, like I do anytime I live somewhere new, mistaking the wisps of features for the face of someone I know, the ceaseless itch to catch a familiar smile. Here I am [again] not sure of anything but my wants clawing at me in hunger. This place crawls with it—the currents of traffic swirling like a drink made of equal parts desire and defeat. What do I still believe in? It is all hollow. I am trying to listen to the echoes.
Listless thrum of the city. From my empty perch I watch the cells pump along their veins, the lines of code marching in their computing. Sad little kingdom of one. This prince of gin will saunter happily home when he is done. Dreams all the richer, thoughts all the wispier, heart all the heavier, the path hiding somewhere up one of these corridors. The answers lie with some mystery fool slouched in the shadows of a corner. But I want to live the maze!—not solve it! See how it presents itself to me as such a puzzle, full of riddling beasts and fantastic creatures. They will try your soul, they always do. They will break you down to show you just what it is you’re made of. In the hope that maybe one day you will piece yourself together.
†
Gatsby and Daisy. Zelda and Scott. This damned city and my soul. Add it to the list of lovers who drew from each other their greatest desires, flickering green unattainable things, let it raise themselves to glory and then drove them to oblivion. An old flame passed me on Bleecker, not even a flicker of recognition. I count that such a win. Ghosts are real; the past lives on [etc., etc.] but just the way we like: in solitude, in silence. I assume my paramours assume I’m delving for the same thing they are. Another novel thrill or simply the right punctuation mark to cap the day. Finite as period. Closed as bracket. Explosive as exclamation. But I’m stubbornly running on the sentence. Open, threading, extending to exhaustion. I scrape the shadows back to their source. The arms reach out to me and I hold them without dreaming and they hold all of us and every lover is a part of the one great love that rises inexplicable in every tower, off every boulevard. Woven, nebulous, interconnected.
I’m giving everything I have to find its heart.
†
When I ask you little questions over coffee, when I laugh with you in little nothings by night, I’m really begging for your story. Give me your mythos, your heart’s quest, your hero’s struggle—when really I mean, I’m a collector —To the extent that my heart sighs open and reaches for all it has reason to love, and all it loves it clings to and converts to ink in its veins, catches and turns to stone in the garden of its adoration. I am the face of the gorgon in the garden, whose great stone eyes roll on.
The great eye of the labyrinth stares lidless, unfeeling from the smog that writhes above Brooklyn Tower. It pierces my smile in a sun-choked ray, chasing the course of the park’s looped thread, past the arch of triumph but not passing through it yet. That portal still flickers hesitant. I run despite the blister that’s screamed from my foot for a week —either out of stubbornness or some muddled belief that by peeling back the wound, by scraping it raw and bringing its mouth to the mouth of roads I’ve traced again and again, I might finally come to understand why they snake the way they do—and with a new patch of skin woven stronger than it was when I am through.
JESUS CHRIST AINT SAVED YOU YET drawls the chunky base of the stoplight. Irony or prophetic? I am not in the habit of trading remarks with crosswalk graffiti, but I pocket them for later, racing toward the city’s pockets of beauty that will become my salvation. TONIGHT I LOVE THE WORLD AND THE WORLD LOVES ME, shrieks the bridge. The love songs I hear all turn to love songs for New York City. If the city really is thought to be not just a labyrinth, but a lover—cunning, wicked, maddening, sweet—I’m left to wonder, like all lovers, whether it finds as much want and wonder in me as I do in it. Any answer it gives comes only in fragments: in the golden graveyard outside my subway car; in the woman with street angel hair and stars on her shoulders, whispering verses to her window’s reflection. Someone else stretches and in my periphery it looks like the gesture of an offering, hands opened wide to my silent longing.
—A reminder that the rhythm waits to fold me back into its river at any given return. There will always be some cool shade in a garden with an empty bench. Always some book on a shelf recommended by men I don’t speak to anymore but whom, by reading the book, I still continue to understand. Always some corner bar with a martini so strong I got drunk off just one—so drunk that when I saw the clock on my screen turn 11:11 I actually thought, I want this to last forever with everyone I love. Always some kind stranger with a beautiful smile. Will it cast enough hooks to keep me? Caught to crawl every day along the rugged teeth of the skyline? I seek to add to the myth of me. But no myth won was ever spun without a bright red thread of cost.
Like Jacob who, after wrestling with an angel all night, found his strength drained when it touched his side, so I am grappling with a beautiful horror of my own, have caught its wrist in my fist, kept its hand on my thigh and cried out bless me! Bless me, as Jacob cried.
I’ve been here before, arms outstretched—knowing what it is to reach for as much golden light as your fingers can catch— Knowing that even if I’m given no foothold and stitched to the same loss, I still hold the hand of an angel, am always wrestling with an angel — metaphorically, as symbolic to struggle; literally, as a lover, as with memories of love. Ignoring the scarlet slit at my side, I still have strength enough to draw my lover [unknowable city, unsolvable maze] close to my heart in one sure, aching rush— to take the rays of his golden hair, twist them in my fingers, draw his head back, throat to the clouds, running my tongue over the big apple adam’s apple, scraping my teeth on its neck, rasping at its ear—a lover’s gasp, a strange kind of blessing to ask for but, if this is an end, fully and thoroughly, let it end me. If this is to ruin me, savage angel, let it ruin me well.
†
August.
The creatures accompanying my flight are a strange menagerie of spirits. A mangled host of guardian angels that do little more than hover at the edges of my steps. Hermes lounges in the arch of every train station, or perched on the railing at the well of tunneling stairs, throws his devious glance to spark some traveler’s dare. Athena flashes a gaze more exacting and sharper than the silver glinting in every sun-tossed pane of glass. Her nose casts a shadow, dour hook that pierces my daily decisions —decisions tied to decisions, playing a game with her thunder-browed brother Ares, record-keeper of the war my heart’s been waging, moving pieces on their board agonizingly slowly. While the heady, man-musk-smelling air of Apollo hangs heavy on us all. He flies low and listless, dripping in song and sweat and want, and I pass Eros on the sidewalk, wearing shorts ridiculously long on his nimble legs, sunglasses that cover half his face, and an LA Dodgers cap of all things. He winds a finger in his corded headphones, lips puckered into a cherry-colored question-mark. I wonder if I’ll end up in bed with him tonight. The nine muses set up shop, flutter about with the façade that will service as today’s uniquely episodic drama. And somewhere out there, deep within the winding, vaulted corridors and lavish, concrete trappings, the monster in the maze lifts its great horned head. What is the monster made of? I still don’t know. I still live each day knowing it may come rearing back out of its cave at any bend. What would I do in the face of that inferno? In all our dealings, it remains the undefeated. I hear the echoes of my questions in its screams, squealing up out of the darkness and melding with the roar of the subway, rocketing heat fresh from the bowels of Hades. I crawl from its tunnels onto black waves of the stars, rocking in loss and gain and I am lost. Again.
†
For all she demands and all she exacts, still the city gives, though maybe without meaning to. The gifts come in pieces, little fragments doled out in seeming happenstance, bestowed only in a flash of a moment. The young boy riding the subway alone, I see him at my stop; he’s always reading a book and looks so much like little me in Grandmother’s pictures. The pair of runners in the park, falling into stride with them for a rhythmic spree we’re a family of three. Fog fills the dance floor and the chandeliers glitter on the ceiling, while a queen ascending the stairs to the midnight ball throws me a smile filled with so much love. The boy scouting marks for his dealer blows smoke, then a kiss, between my open lips. The city melts in my eyes like tiny candles in rippling black glass.
Climbing out of Central Park, I hear the lonely chorus unwind out of a man up on the rock. “The long and winding road! That leads… to your door…” Unwind in the night and that night in a bed not my own some rasping scale of harmonica punched through my sleep to let me know the ghost of a young Bob Dylan was rambling down in the street. Dark truths drool from a beautiful book recommended by a beautiful man. One afternoon is all you get. And the woman with poems unraveling from her hands gives me a hug in the back of the bar and tells me how happy she is that I came, a perfect stranger, tells me everything’s gonna play out just fine, you see? This city can’t help but be any way than what it is. Sinners in the hand of an angry God or me in the throb of an unforgiving thrall, this cruel mistress has a name and it’s Manhattan, wielding inevitable fulfillment and ruin in the light thrown from her all-consuming torch, see it blazing in her eyes. It feels destined, even right that something bearing so much hope and wanting and promise must come with the will to destroy you — and not only this assurance (that what is beautiful truly is ruinous) but the surprising lurch that when it does, you might even find yourself wanting it to.
†
Here we are, the eleventh hour. The sky swirls, the gods converge, swinging off their celestial axis, robes thrashing like shredded ribbons, then snapped — wings folded in descent. Hard to say whether the knot is tangled still more or unraveling; the fibers scrape my grip. I tried my best to make it stick, but the twisted arms are slowing in their spin. Caught between playing a long game and living for the moment has once again brought me to the edge of its embrace. Somehow I thought each day would bring with it some new dance— is not each day a dance in itself? They won’t say I didn’t live for it. The loop unwinds, is set to spring. I’m swung between the two halves of myself, value defined by absence; presence defined by space. A need, desire, drawn to an outline by its lacking, by the loss of the shape it might once have filled. “How enduring. How we need durability.” I lose something vital either way. Have to learn how to get on, live without “it,” —despite knowing the heart’s language shifts. Time’s tide dissolves homes in a moment. They rock like ships, hold me in the worth of their unsteady cradles. Years from this, these dreams will all have been replaced by something else —still inevitably familiar. The need for home, the desire for family, the heart’s reach for a thing beyond itself, remain always the same.
Always there is loss, everywhere, regardless.
And so, fulfillment too.
†
September.
When the door finally opens, it opens without ceremony.
The gate into the long sought for, long fought for heart of the maze folds without announcement. Staring down the maw of a new future, a day that unravels in a yet unmet repetition, your wandering finally given a foothold; the Fates must have woven their thread into the stem of the golden apple you snapped from the tree or the flower you tore from the earth. Light— a sudden drop— the soft green falls away. The sun hurls backward; the thread empties, furious, off the spool— the price exacted in a single clasp, blades embracing in the shears. The deep unfurls; the ground opens, calls you home— timely ripped into the silver-hewn, jewel-set shadow world. Clumps of sod tumble after, a few petal-tossed memories of love. And you are landed at last—back, in the glittering underground. It bellows in silver fire. The chorus of its souls, ceaseless in their song, rocks you to sleep.
But in my dreaming, we are together again, sitting on the green under the fold of the park. And we have cocktails and our old familiar songs and quiet hearts.
…
†
October.
All summer long I carried an unnerving premonition that flit at the corner of every crosswalk. It traced its spindle of a finger in the dust of alley’s shadows, spelling out that if—not when—but if the steps sunk into sequence and I once again struck some surer footing in the labyrinth that is New York—if such a path were to materialize, I knew that taking it would somehow alter the course of my future.
The steps sunk under the weight of stability; the path yawned ahead. The change enacted. The future, set. Of course, the premonition did not extend as far as the exact shape this metamorphosis would take, but the uneasy gnawing in my mind has settled some, knowing that the expected molding has begun.
What creature will emerge from the clay…
The city hardly settles now. It ripples and vibrates over the stony waters. Even if I stare straight on, meet it gaze for gaze, it still can’t still enough for me to rest in complete understanding of what’s taken place. All I know is that it has happened. At last. Again.
I spend so much time in the rush now; trains are the only noise that afford me the quiet to think. The course of steel rocks its blanket song like a curtain of waves, and my heart expands at the flood of dreams held back all day, now swarming up as if the train itself smashed a dam, and the whole gush swallows all other movement in one great, incessant spin. My dreams too flit too rapidly to reveal any shape or definition. They’re like moths, finally let in—past the pane, in at the light. And it’s so terrible and consuming that what can they do but beat themselves hopelessly against it, still trying to crack at the center, to burn in the heart, to become one with the glow?
A few days ago I went to see the timekeeper. Ancient, unaged, there he’s stayed in the shop off Bowery, ticking with eyebrow raised and nimble hands poised in the task of replacing my watch band yet again. —A miniature image of the stage which has seen the prelude, suspended for years, come to a buttoned finish. Act I now settles over the dusk. Its rhythm consumes, giant clock spinning a turntable of work. Finally getting exactly what I asked for. All my weight pressed on the door, so skeptical of its opening that I still find myself caught in the sickly lurch, the drop of falling forward when finally, it did. I still haven’t found the ground. But after the time shop, in my climb to stand beneath my patron ghost, that torch-bearing spirit of industry, the bones of so many birds snapped between the cobbles and my feet; lining the path, the skeletons of so many dismembered omens. Dissecting the premonitions, pulling apart the prophecies, draping the corridor of the future with the corpses of destiny.
The cost of the city. It settles on me heavy. It’s not a fiction anymore, not a fragmented fraction of an idea. It too folds into the pattern of my life: a pattern that brings me always within reach of what I most desire—then denies it, and just when I’ve learned to live without, to let it go—it offers me the dream to keep, to hold. Even if these gifts are sweeter for the loss that might have come before, they never come without cost, no matter how softly exacted; and I can never claim ignorance. Everything I hoped for has been granted. And with it, everything I feared.
Spending the first day of this summer’s venture far outside the city, at a temple draped in ivy and old-world flowers, cast a seemingly mythic pall over the weeks to follow. While my dear friend settled in the courtyard, quietly constructing a farewell of his own, I wandered stone halls full of medieval relics, my mind already beginning to outline the wound quietly slitting open at my side, the shape of which I would come to caress and memorize in the coming nights. What a strange tendency this, to eroticize the suffering, to give some wandering, aching loss or self-willed tide of transformation the humming force of ecstasy, breathed into the body, chasing the loss of love, the loss with love, to love what was lost, to love all the more for the loss.
The medieval reliefs stare on, open mouthed, in abject empathy. They understand the stirred dust of settled but never dissipated spirits, hammering at the door of my heart. When you weave such a strong and binding web to the ones you love, you have to accept that you might never find it again if you choose to leave it for some other shore. But, the smallest of consolations—it can be transformed; it can, perhaps, be held, hold you, in a different way. —In a life at the center of the vortex, in the heart of the maze, a place where Eros in its maddening haunt, chases the bitter with the sweet in perpetual dance. Should you too feel yourself at the dark of the tomb, at the mouth of the labyrinth, stationed between the father Minotaur and the mother Sphinx, join us still learning to dance there, the still point in a turning world, thread neverending, the ends folding in on their beginnings. We are slowly, in all its aches and bliss, stitching the wound of change to some new beauty. We are slowly learning to live the maze, instead of merely solve it.
a literary labyrinth 