Eric Stiefel: At This Point, I’d Take Anything

A claw of thread’s all it takes to follow one thought to the next—
when West killed himself I didn’t say his name out loud for months,
 
though most days I still lean forward and pull my head back as if
some spectral hand pulls my chin taut and points my gaze to the life
 
he abandoned inside this house of chaos we call everyday or otherwise
inscrutable, my shoulders trembling like stained glass, the same way, 
 
I imagine, Theseus trembled as his father threw himself to the rocks,
not long after he left Ariadne sleeping on a beach made of coral and grit,
 
the mind displaced while the body stays behind, the breath clipped short
and calcified, strung up in the overgrown garden Dante held back for suicides,
 
while, in some version of the myth, Ariadne became a god, goddess of serpents
and twine and everything tangled, winged beasts hovering on the fringe
 
of knowing one way or the other, gloating on the worn-out roots of the trees 
we’ll be burdened to, until I’m sitting on the floor in front of a coffee table
 
pleading first with myself and then everything else, this skeleton of history
and an infinity of arrangements of the stars for an answer of some kind—  
 
at this point, I’d take anything that masquerades as understanding like a barrel
to my chest, something to cradle off into the murk and the shadows of the night.