Inside David's Labyrinth

I sat behind my door in my little house,
which was all entry,
and thoroughly enjoyed its protection.

~ Henry Thoreau

It was worth this evening of gin and single malts
just to get these words on the page, a sadness that speaks
more of the world around us than the world inside us,
like a Hakone puzzle box, its opening mechanism broken.

These are not limpid waters, or standing pools
of light. The muse has left me, like a house sparrow, for the Nuttalls,
and then returned. It traversed with the wind, a vaned feather,
down to the tree line where it rested on a branch.

It was a Weymouth Pine, or something smaller,
more timid. David watched a racoon from his perch in my treehouse.
It looked sad, lying on its side as it gazed out at the world.
Through sleepy eyes, an acorn in its paw, half-buried in sand.

The muse rose as Black Orpheus, as if the song lilted its shadows.
The muse now lives in the shadow of the sundial,
its angular face turning to face northwest, lights beckoning.
My treehouse has become our treehouse through the years.

David remembered Camberwell and Peckham as brick and mortar,
a deep song, he used to say. Undergirding its poorest corners,
another unburnished voice, going at it alone.
It was a raw memory, each line rending another fractured picture.

There was a woman who counted beads every afternoon,
so long as eight ended up in the blue box, eleven in the green.
Sometimes she lined them up, like shale pebbles,
the paisley tablemat like the seven-ring labyrinth off Tintagel.

In the chapel was the old man with dementia.
Today, he wore his mother’s skirt, rolled up to his chest.
Beside him was the girl in the pink dress, her hair around her face.
The welts on her thighs that rose to her upper back.

David took a marker, wrote his name on the floorboards.
We shared a meat and pecan pie, in a box squat on newspapers,
as he pulled out old photographs from a shoebox.
One of him in pantaloons as a child, smudged lipstick and rouge.

He turned the puzzle box upside down, and looked for a turnkey
and drum and bells, as if it were a music box.
He said he saw his name on the underside, its simple geometry
weathered with age. Then, he shook it, for a charm to fall out.

- Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé
Second Prize Winner, The TRYangle Project Poetry Competition 2011