A Parable

(for B.)

by Rolando Tinio

Like most of us, you wish for death:

Like the Sybil of Cumae caged in glass,
Without desire for the past of things,
Without power to hold them at a distance.

We suffer from excess of knowledge:

Each instant starts at a mythic crossroad.
We stand to choose the particular way
We wish our tragedy to take.

So we stumble on public parks

And stop at the feet of statues asking
Cryptic questions about strange beasts.
So we dash along the bend

Where highways meet, and enter cities

Unrolling streets for us to tread,
And in the night perform ablutions
To clear our hands of all our choices.

And still, in sleep we make our rounds,

Descending labyrinths all doors,
Making entrances of exits.
Hell is an endless promenade.

As in a gothic garden live

With statuary in marbled white:
They loom above your head, those heads
Drilled with holes, as if the eyes

Fixed inward and gazed themselves to stone.

Memory is full of Gorgons,
The plague that cries deliverance.
Theban Magus, teach us to pluck

The inner eye: this trick of mirrors,

Bright as the burst of pomegranates.