Cynthia Hogue

from In June, the Labyrinth

                 In memory of L.W. and L.E.H.

The following poems attached are excerpted from Cynthia Hogue’s serial poem, In June, the Labyrinth, part elegy, part pilgrimage (the figure of the labyrinth and the dying central "you" runs through the series), in progress.

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Where have you, vast as horizon, flush,
then reddening, in some ways, furious at sunset—
and plaintively—pulling at the curtains of darkness,
gone?

A gale-wind has cut a swath in trees past the house.
I lean into that guilt, which is loss, golden,
the gloss of evening sun in a scatter of branch
underfoot.

The gate at the end of the garden is cross-hatched,
unpainted wood, and behind it,
a shadowed stillness. The pine and birch are filling with
night.

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In the middle of the end you land.

You’d said Come to all of it,

and it all came and now it’s all,

as it must be, gone. You never called for help.

You never said "forgive me" to another,

but the language of forgiveness can be silent:

unheard or unspoken.

Forgiveness is a labyrinth, a way,

going this direction and not that,

the ethical route and heart’s root,

the core, of course, riddle of how

to cure the poison of the demon

that bitterness that

bent you like a bell

until, at last, you sounded

                                          sound.

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I was trying to recall that
those who enter the labyrinth
can leave.

Calculations from the measurements show
this is not so.
There’s no way around this problem.

I must seek a solution to the geometry
that my future has unverged with yours.
I am not dead but silenced.

Cynthia Hogue's eighth collection of poetry, Revenance, will be published in Fall 2014 (Red Hen Press). In spring (2014), she was Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell. She teaches in the MFA Program at Arizona State University, and lives with her husband, the French economist, Sylvain Gallais, in Phoenix.