standing in front of the Eifel tower,
snapping a picture
with a disposable camera. One hand raised to
crowd his family closer together,
so at least, when they show their friends,
they can pretend they had a good time.
Can I expect you to crawl through all the
muck in my soul
to find a clean spot to make your nest?
Or else, maybe, find a way out,
through what is probably an endless
labyrinth.
And there’s sure to be a minotaur or two down
there,
and they haven’t been fed recently.
The difference though, between the maze in my
mind
and the labyrinth in my soul,
is that a maze is full of dead ends and false
starts.
And a labyrinth has only one end, if you can
only stay alive long enough to find it.
So I’ll just let you wander, hand pressed to
the wall,
because it’s too dark to see
because I’ve made the ceiling and floor
out of scraps of night sky.
And I’ve made the walls out of
Michelangelo’s frescos.
And its too bad you can’t see the paintings
on the walls,
but you can feel them in the dark.
You can feel what the painter felt when he
put brush to plaster,
which perhaps is better.
With everything else, I horde them here in
the labyrinth.
Paintings and pancakes and algebra and being
a daughter
and all the other things I was never really
good at.
This is my existence;
building walls to keep you in
because I’m afraid if you see the way out,
you’ll take it.
So I add another line of bricks and mortar
and pray the minotaur finds you
before you can turn my heart in to the police
with some half-shingled lie about
how you found it on the street
and about how it was already empty when you
picked it up.
***
Emma
Mason is a recent graduate and longtime lover of Tim O’Brien.
