Try entering the maze another way. It isn’t wrong
to want a different ending. All those women understood;
all those schoolchildren; all those mink trying to get from one place
to a gentler one, or just moving for the sake of it, just getting along.
We don’t want to think of horses and see a team of them waiting
to pull a single body into four. We want the drill to be
a drill, we want it to be like playing hide-and-seek, or like skating
for the breeze of it. I want to look at woods and not think of wood
chips or money or dead birds. Forgotten, forget, forgot:
I haven’t, can’t, never, all the disasters I have almost seen. Of course
there have been un-healable things; flinchings that mark each spot
where I have been squeezed, tested like fruit—where the horse
bucked and dragged my child self down the trail beneath tree
after tree. I can remember everything, but choose to fold it away
so I can sleep. So I don’t terrify my children. Some may
think that in a war, both sides suffer equally, that both sides cry
out with equal misery. But it’s not true. When the sun shone
through the bullet holes in the wall of the maze, I saw no green
through them. Others said it’s just the nature of walls to be seen
through in so many places. Its holes are not failures. Beneath this sky,
there can be no failure. How else to sail calmly on?
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