Your breath, a white net, a gossamer veil
falling into the dark waters beside
your hand. Your hand, a coral branch, a gray
comb, now parting the curtains from your eyes.
Your eyes, two halos, fire-ringed coronas
beaming bright as moons against the blue skin
of your face. Your face, a cobalt opal,
a smooth luminescent stone balancing
upon your shoulders. Your shoulders, a wood
frame, a cross buried in the sand, pressing
into your spine. Your spine, a marble road,
a long porcelain serpent constricting
around your womb. Your womb, a burning house,
a violet light pluming into your mouth.

Laocoon turns upward, drawn beyond Earth’s curved prison,
        watching broken cloudscapes sink, then dissipate—
turns the salt wind in his mouth metallic,
            the copper taste of prophecy held back; and then
upward snaps his spine in a white arc, breath splintering the ribs
                as the weight of heaven begins to sink
drawn like wire through stone, the body singing under torque,
                    a struck bell ringing into cloudscapes—
beyond carved pediment and horse-ribbed hull, the old sea-law
                        reasserts itself, paternal covenants broken,
Earth’s grit in the teeth; the boys’ thin arms
                            wheel air too vast for any god watching—
curved through rib and hip, the scaled rope kisses tendon,
                                pulls their living shape into a prison—
prisoned in salt-spray glare, the spine arcs like a column
                                    cracked and serpent-curved;
watching his sons thin to shadow, he tastes salt and lime
                                in the wound and feels the pull of Earth.
Broken daylight gutters in the sockets;
                            even marble seems to lean and tilt beyond
cloudscapes blackened at the rims; the upper vault sags
                        heavy, every last bright margin drawn.
Sinking begins at the groin where lineage gathers,
                    a downward drag no mortal can lever upward
then the face hardens into something gods mistake for praise,
                the rictus tightening as agony turns
dissipate blood, dissipate lineage—marble cools
            around the twist and fixes the father, Laocoon.

For days we ran, the axle shrilling in the heat,
the cart-poles grinding deeper in the bone;
no oxen left—we bore the weight alone
of mother and the road beneath our feet.
We ran because the wheels would not retreat—
the weeds snapped sharp inside the turning spokes,
the road pulled tight between the fields and stones,
and Delphi lifted pale beyond the wheat.
They say Apollo gave the brothers rest—
sleep sealed their eyes like mercy in the dark.
But legend lies. We woke. The harness bit
again the flesh. We turned our faces west
and saw the glacier’s old, receding mark,
a line of stones still marching south of it.

Queen Pasiphaë is redeemed by the sword
when she hears her child’s echo in the cave—
not unlike her shrieks in the wooden beast
when she braced under the white bull’s shadow.
Now, justly induced by her daughter’s thread
and hand, her bastard son’s assassin weaves

in and out of the labyrinth, he weaves
more deftly than a needle with his sword,
piercing the darkness at each turn, the thread
leading his hands to the mouth of the cave—
soon Theseus will emerge, his shadow
reconfigured in the light, and the beast

now a story upon his lips, the beast
reduced to a tapestry that he weaves
from the edge of his unraveling shadow.
Yet still its blood is hot upon his sword
as he is running blindly through the cave,
his left palm scorched by Ariadne’s thread.

His left palm burns from Ariadne’s thread
as he is running blindly through the cave
to draw its blood, hot upon his sword,
and join the remnants of his own shadow.
Reduced to a tapestry he later weaves,
a story brimming on his lips, the beast

is reconfigured in his mind: the beast
and Theseus will converge, their shadows
reeling back and forth within the cave,
facing darkness at each turn, the thread
then deftly wending under hoof and sword
along the labyrinth’s edge. He weaves

through night, the bastard son’s assassin weaves
fatefully led by Ariadne’s thread,
he lunges under the minotaur’s shadow
as Pasiphaë once braced under Daedalus’ beast.
She hears her child’s echo in the cave:
Queen Pasiphaë is redeemed by the sword.

Ugolino dreams behind the heavy doors, his growing hunger
reverses to plenty, the doors— mercifully unlocked. What removes
currents, a voice reproves, firmly resists the flow of power,
Arno’s ebbing forces soon secured. The count wakes, and moves
shadowed on the floor before his weeping sons, between
verges of daylight, the narrow shafts on the walls,
searches beyond those inner corridors—where new hope precedes
below dreams, where a shadow can overtake all miracles—
Pisa’s sudden forgiveness for Ugolino’s crimes, their freedom, then
coastal waters beyond his vision; where his family ingests
towers in perfect rows. Swallow, a voice summons them:
conceives to keep its hidden form. Take the youngest.
Total the bones tomorrow. Unfolding terrors reveal his heirs.
Power is this— unspoken schemes are always eaten first.

The wheat glistens in the September sun,
as bright as the fine hairs along the cheek
of a girl who points at the horizon,
where the sky and her index finger meet,
tracing the long line of her origin.
She anticipates the expanding flames
from the earth, her incandescent prison,
that vast, infinitely shimmering plain
of light undulating in the north wind,
which spills into the corners of the room
when she opens the long yellow curtains.
Combing her hair by the window, she moves
as deliberately as a composer,
her blonde rows now burning in the warm air.

collapses and the corporeal flames
flicker long into the evening,
when wind collects bits of ash and makes
the tips of the blackened fields glow. She
will arrive soon, intemperate and
invisible, to inter her breath
within the broken houses of men.
She has been present since words and myths
were realized, and gods were conceived
to enforce them, holding the courses
of temple and water, steadying
the trees as they gripped the shifting earth
with their knotted hands. She was at rest
in the white sails of man’s first conquest.

You’re predisposed to attracting the wild.
I’m not deceived by your far-off gaze
or the canted edges of your smile.

The gods confer—perhaps they are beguiled
enough to send the animals your way.
You’re predisposed to attracting the wild.

The geese and rabbits shadow you awhile
as we converse or kiss—they can’t but stray
to the canted edges of your smile.

With this, you resurrect the god of wine,
the moribund branch, the shriveled grape.
You’re predisposed to attracting the wild.

In Eros / Thanatos, you grant new life—
Prometheus flickers in your gaze
and the canted edges of your smile.

I can’t resist the revels—half a child,
half a beast—who needs the right to say:
You’re predisposed to attracting the wild
with the canted edges of your smile.

The Japanese gave immanence to age,
a furtive magic in the oldest cat,
or so says Zack at the Meow Café—
headset mic askew. A special breed, to be exact,
of courtesan and kitten—a lineage spanning
Hello Kitty to yokai. He notes such prostitutes
were often found by customers covertly
choking down a fish, a dark rebuke
against desire’s aftermath. And then:
a Classic Persian jabs its paw
from a fuzzy peephole near Zack’s head,
precursor to the playful clause
that curiosity—the bane of cats—
can also kill a writer’s act.