Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

The Minotaur Explains
                    (for my brothers)

And how would you feel?
Naked and hungry in the cold maze,
hooves and horns cracking
from malnutrition, lonely
 in this big place
(for I was just a little thing when first exiled).

Think.
How would you feel?

And before they even cut that last corner,
they're shrieking,
their eyes already screaming open to take in
the certain monster town gossip warned about.

The very first one I approached differently though,
a frail upstart of a lad, strangely similar
to myself, forced into my space.
It was with him I learned it's impossible
to befriend one who already knows you
as enemy somehow.

And so many winters later, the horror is still vivid:
his club slapping away my outstretched hand,
his disgust cooling my smile.

It was with him it was decided:
live like a legend,
eat well.

The Shell

"If you must leave us, now or later, the sea will bring you back."

                                 -- Melvin Dixon, Land's End

When we arrived at the hospital, it had already happened.

Such shock initially and then the guilt that enters like
the half-light filtering through the drawn venetian blinds,
dust motes skating along the long soft rays, a young man's
thin fingers reaching out to whatever lies beyond
his immaculate bed sheets, everything so white.

Had the ten minute shower truly been necessary?
Did I really need those silver dollar pancakes stacked
so perfectly? That hazelnut coffee (three sugars, no milk)?
And how could I eat anyway?
And where was he at the time?

At what stage of departure when the butter began to melt
into the griddle-fresh cakes? And as I mixed the raspberry
and blueberry syrups? When my grandmother cringed
at the thought of the overwhelming sweetness going down,
where was he then?

The questions continued nagging, making their case
for complicity, culpability--surely he would have lived
that much longer under our gaze, if only we had been here
staring at him: the drained son, the hollowed uncle,
the discomfited dynamo.

But it had already happened.

My grandmother began the expected ritual:
grabbing the indifferent ashen hands, kissing
the unresponsive graying cheek, wailing
so that the entire staff, if not the world,
would know of her loss, its deep echoes.

I however stayed quiet, seemingly aloof save the hand
holding onto her shoulder lest she be drawn into

that vortex and forget there were others still here for her,
fortunate survivors holding onto his bronze memory,
that juggernaut we truly believed was unstoppable.

My eyes were there too, caught up in the observation of
the defeated husk, the unnecessary intravenous needles still
piercing the armor, and the rebellious mouth frozen open,
a final defiant scream rendered indelible, his ultimate battle cry,
his last attempt to move something in the waveless room.

I imagined the soul, radiant even though invisible,
escaping from his head, rising slowly like
wisps of smoke curling away from a doused flame,
and I wondered where my uncle had gone.
And why he had left behind his cherished shell.

I held my grandmother's shoulder firmly
and prayed to the gods of the ritual that
there is a greater heaven and that my uncle was just
a hermit crab freed now from a traitorous home.

And that the darkness I saw under his half-open lids
was not the abyss I feared was there
but a deep warm sea calling,
calling us back.

The Farmer and the Snake
                         (after Aesop)

As the teacher told the tale, the snake,
antediluvian symbol of deception and evil,
was found outside in winter, frozen stiff,
by the farmer, symbol of goodness and humanity.

The farmer, a kind but naive soul,
pulled the hapless snake to his chest--
home of the beating heart, putative wellspring
of man's benevolence--and then,

so the story went, carried the snake's
tubular body--dying and different and,
by implication, ostensibly undeserving--
back to the farm and family, the man's

rustic castle with its expectedly loyal subjects.
The characters and settings thus
forcibly arranged, the story proceeds
according to plan: the cared-for snake warming

then waking by the fireplace, thanklessly
attacking the selfless family. Then the farmer,
always the fearless savior and protector,
rushing in brandishing his trustworthy ax--

phallic symbol of the man's strength and power--
hacking the snake into scaly villainous bits.
The story warns us that some creatures
can't be trusted, certain groups of them

unworthy of our generosity.
But what the story lacks is balance,
a proper means of weighing
the elements of significance,

like an absent, but necessary, fulcrum that
supports the respect for the individual,
that appreciates the nature of that particular
snake and farmer, the uniqueness of

that farm and welcoming family.
What's missing is reality:
not every farmer is so kind, not every snake
so ungrateful, and some families and homes

are themselves unbearably cold.
Perhaps opening your heart and home
are inherently dangerous offers,
necessarily involving risk.

But no challenge is ever properly
hurled at such a perfect answer.
And that, my friend,
is why it's called a fable.

Here's the Rub, Beelzebub

That we arrive pre-tortured,
and, thus, numbed, inured,
thoroughly tormented long
before the hackneyed fall.

So all you acquire is dross,
limp ash once the bonfire
cools, cold meat left over
from a sumptuous repast.

Those tragic few among us
who abstained from all such
ardent enticements now find
themselves in danger, screaming

at the novelty of your
searing touch, but the rest of us,
we come as ragged survivors--
all heavy heads, heaving chests--

as slaves, marked and branded,
our stiffening muscles, wearied,
accustomed to varying degrees
of abuse, well versed in the cruel

art, in the actual experience of
misery, our charred souls already
claimed, already the battered
chattel of some other tyrant.

Bodily

Given the hairline crack in my
bedroom mirror, I now realize
there is a grave need for concern,
concern about the gross flaw it--
wholly unconcerned, impenitent--
slashes across every imperfect, yet
workable, reflection, the inconsistency
it adds to the innocent details of
any image, an undesired deepening of
whatever shiny tragedies already
lie sandwiched between the layers
of dust and silver backing.
And I can appreciate, now,
the self-indulgent run of the fracture,
splintering the seen thing into chaos,
the troublesome thread of refracted
light, growing, spreading steadily
until it becomes the principal
focus of the gaze, until
it is the something-to-see.
This is the bittersweet lesson which
survivors--despite their tender scars,
their sleep-altering regrets--
limp homeward from adversity with.
This is the dangerous knowledge:
that there's no gainsaying a bruise, that
there's peril in ignoring the disturbing
speckled egg recently-appeared in
the nest, and that any weed popping its
officious head up in the trusting green
of the yard--no matter how slight
or shy initially--can usurp the
entire field if left unchecked.
 

Postcard from Orbis Tertius
(after Borges, Wittgenstein)

Everything I own is here with me now.
Every happiness I have ever known
must exist presently as well.
The mind is the key to it all.

What is past is merely dreamed,
nothing painful sticking to the slick
surface of the actual.

And what could happen--
the possible repair of a leaking roof,
a panoramic dawn as I rise--
is but mere fantasy.

This is all there is:
all that my mind will take in--
my restless body and shaking hand,
this ink pen and how it works with me.

Here, I see only myself, standing alone
atop steep hills, in the present, sometimes
an illusion of you imagined for yesterday,
a dream of you pondered for tomorrow--

you, whom I refer to as merely
the-glittering-once-thought-to-justify-my-living,
the-ending-after-which-my-breathing-yet-continues.

James Whitley was born in Mount Vernon, New York and holds degrees from Cornell, Boston, Harvard, and Northeastern universities. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in several journals including Caribbean Writer, Mississippi Review, Poetry Midwest, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Xavier Review. He is the author of two chapbooks, Pieta (Pudding House Publications, 2001) and The Golden Web (Wind River Press, 2003), and two collections of poetry, Immersion (Lotus Press, 2002)(selected by Lucille Clifton as the winner of the 2001 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award) and This Is The Red Door (the winner of the 2003 Ironweed Press Poetry Prize) (forthcoming in 2004). Whitley lives in Boston, Massachusetts where he works as a staff attorney with Community Catalyst, a nonprofit organization focusing on health care issues. In his role as staff attorney, Whitley works to protect the interests of health consumers in health plan and hospital conversions and acquisitions.
"The Minotaur Explains" first appeared in Improvijazzation Nation, "The Shell" in The Higginsville Reader, "The Farmer and the Snake" in Facets, "Here's the Rub, Beelzebub" in Absinthe Literary Review, "Postcard from Orbis Tertius" in Valparaiso Poetry Review, and "Bodily" in Mississippi Review.