Less than we began

Walking The Labyrinth

Because someone set these stones where they are,
patterned them into a spiral befuddle, the paths
appearing as if by some improbable construct of
unnatural possibility, each granite scale hewn and
brooved from some place above us that emerged
from some place below to be arranged thusly as
we place now one foot before the other to undertake
the small and brief business of this gathering day.

We pass between them like snows that have come and
gone over centuries, our minds padding into our soles,
one step and another, emptying all we might have
considered as we do so, making room for what comes,
what inevitably appears in spite of us, making within
such winding circles something like a journey: deer
prints; scattered pine seeds; fathers gone past; songs
of wandered children to come; the brevity of planets.



Come then verging tears at the rivergates of sorrow, of
abject joy, of no reason whatsoever for they come flooding
always together in the same channel whispering rock and
redwood, salting yellow autumn through orange monarchial
air as blue jays rift the boughs and we circle tighter and tighter,
each footfall another decade of descending until we are not
here or there but someplace between ourselves where we don’t
quite fit in ways we hoped, surrendering circle after circle.

Into unholy middles of our uncentered selves we arrive
somehow less than we began, bits left behind, unfaltered
pieces flung ahead, as if such seasons were promised us
beyond this pathless reckoning. Once arrived, we venture
out swiftly to be reborn into the slowing pace of what we
come to find in this place—twig, heart, acorn, hand—the sum
of who we are when we abandon who we are, leave it scattered
in the turns, don the smalling of who we might then become.

Joseph Gallo
October 16, 2013