Vision Quest

Maze in the center.
No entrance visible
but the journey requires me
to seek it,
so I seek it.

I am circling,
looking for the gate,
listening for a creak,
feeling for chinks and seams.

Push hard, whisper
old spells, light fires,
burn herbs; nothing
is revealed.

Turn and look behind me
and there is the open gate
that has been outside of me
this whole time.

I walk through and there I am
now, inside the center, having no clue
as to the physics or geometry
involved.  But there is the first turn,
and I move deep into the labyrinth,
turn upon turn. 

A book on the ground
now: I turn to a passage:

“There is a road that is not
visible.  You walk it here on earth
not knowing all the dimensions
you pass through, and once at the end,
you will not have a way back.”

How familiar it is, this puzzle
now, the walls that hold my old photographs
and scribblings, my struggle
laid out before I arrived this time. 

At the center of the maze,
a stone.  A mouth in the stone
and a rose in the mouth in the stone.
A hawk above that will not light,
a wind blowing up out of the earth.

I have been inside and outside myself
and found past embedded in present and future,
and how will I get back now
that there is no difference?