Author's Note​: While pursuing degrees in philosophy and art history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I became intrigued with ancient mythology. Years later when I revisited mythology, I became interested in the mythical themes that are shared by many cultures. This led me to “The Golden Bough,” and the studies of archetypes pursued by Carl Jung and his protégé, Mary Louise van Franz. I also started to research the Tarot in terms of its history and its relationship to myth. At that point I began began writing the poems that have become this book, which I have titled “Labyrinth”—a series of 29 poems related to these ongoing myths and memes. My motivation to write it comes from an urge to explore the metaphysical rather than the epistemological nature of what we perceive, believe and profess as knowledge.  The next six poems in the book feature more philosophical questions and reflections on metaphysical and epistemological notions rather than on the Tarot and mythological themes.
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Editor's Note:  I am publishing the whole of "Labyrinth" in monthly installments.

XVII
THE TRIBUNAL OF METAPHYSICIANS
Give me matter and I will construct a world out of it.
                                                     —Immanuel Kant
 
The many languages of history
are sounds to symbolize the sentient.
Each shibboleth, a different utterance
that strives to correspond with meaning.
 
Is this viscous sense of perception
a slippery self-affirmation
reflected in the Chaos?
Did Nietzsche’s Logos
speak with Zarathustra’s Eros
or were they Cartesian demons
dancing on Reason’s tightrope?
 
We work our way with Parmenides
through endless sets of opposites:
the positives and negatives
in Pythagorean polarity.
 
Did the men in Socrates’ Symposium
invent these complements of contrast?
like mathematics’ symbolic integers––
multiplying fractions
that curve into Zeno’s Paradox.
 
The limitation of perception
holds the burden of inquiry
in sacks we haul
upon our bending backs.
 
Of micro-physics’ quantum potential:
When are we the particles
and when are we the waves?





XVIII
SUNFLASH
 
 
I fall into the penumbra
between feeling and reason
and reel in the slowness of light––
stars are reflections,
energy traveling the midnight blue sky.
 
My thoughts are diminishing fractals
dividing as replicate patterns
in the space
where time has no sequence––
the electromagnetic,
refracted from the blast of creation
oscillates its memory
in the celestial cocoon.
 
Free waves and particles
bound together as atoms
form the illusion of matter:
the electric impulse of thought.
 
Sparks arc across neurons
in the mind’s memesphere––
shooting stars cross
the mind’s midnight sky.
 
My senses flare in a sunflash:
Is the perceiving self an essence
that takes a body, or do the mitochondria
of bodies create selves
as a form in which to exist?
The perceiving self and its body:
illusion and matter in the electromagnetic web.
 
And I beg of the fleeting present,
where did the time go? and then ask,
from where does it come?
Perhaps it’s the distance between events
that gives one the perspective
of a past, present, and future.





XIX
THE DISTANCE
 
 
In finite space
the curvature of forever
out of grasp
wraps into itself
and nourishes the transient present
 
that slides in
to the past
and glides
with an endless immediacy.
 
Is Now a marker,
or like a star,
energy traveling through time’s space?
or illusion,
an elusive dream
tucked in the crease
of a shadow?
 
Do we journey
in time’s space, or
does it radiate through
us
to finally exist
as a layer
of the past
we just became?
 
I want to become
an illusion in the present;
a memory of myself,
if for only
fleeting moments
found in future creases
tucked inside pasts.
 
But the distance
keeps curving
further away.





XX
DÉSHABILLE OF THOUGHT
 
 
This is not the music,
but the tones of notes––
I want to become a melody
tuned to the rhythm of the universe.
 
I want to slip out
of this négligée of thought
and climb into the curve
that spills between arpeggios.
 
I want to become the oscillation
of sound and light waves––
return to the edge of the beginning
and bathe in the pool
where dreams come to drink.





XXI
BRACKISH WATERS
 
 
Cool velvet to the skin,
I bathe in brackish waters.
Bittersweet tastes of age and youth
vacillate
where shoreline meets sea
coming and going,
and coming again.
 
Waves, breakers find me floating;
driftwood
in cool turquoise froth.
Cleansing waters
uncover smooth palm-sized pebbles
of my life washed clean
in the impetuous blue sea,
rediscovered
like lost memory.
 
I speak with smooth stones;
the moon and egg.
A crab’s life in the emptiness
of shimmering shell’s nest
offers redolent light;
a child’s simple surprise.
 
I delight in this ritual.
I re-explore forgotten days:
largess of minutiae
left on shore
with each shift of tide.
 
I see the glint;
hidden sun glancing off cloud edge
in one soft moment,
youth recovered
under this redeeming sky.
I blush, a kiss salty and sweet,
briny mist wet on my lips.

I speak with the sea breeze
of waves
coming and going,
and coming again.
Time drifts in and out of shorelines
on Maine’s rocky coast.
 
I offer homage
to the stones and shells––
their wordless story
told in brackish waters.




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XXII
A FISTFUL OF TIME
 
 
I looked back
for an instant,
over my shoulder
into the shadow;
the reflection––wraith--
had vanished,
just drifted away.
 
I paused,
two, three, four.
Grasping my breath
from the jaws
of a ghost dance
I slept,
drifting away,
three, four, five.
 
This handful of time,
four, five, six
slips through my fist
runs through my fingers;
oil on water,
ripples depart
in cool iridescence;
waves in a dream,
drifting away.
 
Turning 40 from 20,
a fistful of time
holds my death
in a ghost song
I slept
just drifting
away.