“Delivered under the similitude of a dream, wherein is discovered the manner of his setting out, his dangerous journey, and safe arrival at the desired country.”

–John Bunyan

I. Solitary Refinement

At the hour of second sight, he scrawls

two marks—one holy, one erratic—

an incantation on his office wall,

like the sympathetic magic

of his primordial kin—whose curves

of ochre bison, hunters, horses,

the French so lovingly preserved.

He’ll be half-blind like them, forced

to squint while scribbling in the faintest light

where shadows move like feral beasts—

he’ll press his fingers to his eyes

to prove he actually exists, to cleave

the borders of his prison cell

in every hollow of his skull.

II. Horror Vacuui

The noble savage is a mythic lark,

yet proves no less compelling.

How then does man outwit the dark

without putting out his eyes, or sailing

heedlessly toward the burning sun?

Must he lash himself—and his brother—

to a rattling chariot, and run

to death beside him for their mother’s

madness? His choices are more limited

than tracing filament through a maze.

Perhaps the ‘enlightened’ primitive

will cry into that boundless cave,

only to hear voices beyond the room,

echoing deeper into the vacuum.

III. The Persistence of Division

But then the office space grows dim,

the only light, his thoughts—refracted through

his bourbon, ice, and the tumbler’s rim—

a film unspooling out of view:

his final moments drawing near;

a flicker caught between this world and that;

a blurred frame for each passing year—

now ending on this faded photograph:

He’d always thought his wife had smiled

a bit obliquely for a bourgeois girl,

sunning on that imperial virgin isle

by a native decked in costume pearls

strung from his belly to his nose.

He gave her horns—the native, a halo.