All my paths have led to Knossos:
to this site, this stretch of soil.
With trowel and brush I sculpt
the palace, a labyrinth of toil,
the hybrid truth imprisoned at its centre.
The map of the palace expands into hills,
deep into Cretan strata
and beyond. Horizons fuse.
Every corridor is connected to every other,
labyrinth without end.
the palace is infinite
we stand within it even now
There is no centre to this maze,
though I search dead-end corridors:
no answers,
only questions
about the question to which
this palace was an answer.
How to contain a monster?
A question never asked,
save by me
as I reconstruct a palace that never was.
My notebooks gather dust,
become the history they purported
to clarify. Through discourse,
I have constructed an edifice
in which the next generation
of Athenian scholars
will wander.
My maps have become the labyrinth.
The very paths along which I sought truth
now imprison it.
And I have become what I sought to slay.
I have become Minotaur
trapped in my own rhizome.
Matthew Rettino has written poetry for Scrivener Creative Review, The Veg literary magazine, and Lantern Magazine. His urban fantasy short story “The Goddess in Him” (NewMyths.com, 2020) is about a time-traveling Scythian refugee living in Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood. A graduate of McGill University and the Odyssey Writing Workshop (’16), he currently works as a pedagogical councillor at Dawson College and teaches occasionally at the Thomas More Institute in Montreal.
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