For ARJ
by Michael Stynes
The many-fingered rose
window holds
the sun in its palm. I will
take it, and you will ask
me why I hold it in such tightly
clenched fists and
do not
let it spill through my fingers
as the glass let it. I will
reply that though I seem
to hold it, I possess
only as much
as the window, that I too
am seen through. You will laugh and ask
me not to play this game, and I
will stand with
one leg crossed
over the other and look down.
Were I not to take it, neither
you nor I
would speak and each of us
would stand already with his legs
crossed, looking down
at the floor where a maze is made
from stones
he follows from the entrance
at the outer rim to
the center on
his knees, and would look
up at the
multifoliate palm.
I look down at the maze and know
that you, as you
look at the gesture,
will joke that if
I were as adept
at solving the maze
as I am
at playing this
game, we would have
left and not
have watched the
petals
drop onto stones.
I gesture to the flower and
return what I should
have not taken. Though
you still
smile as if what I had taken
were yours and I
were returning it after
feignings and evasions. As if now we
could speak freely, and were
not standing on one side of the maze
beneath a
flower, dry-palmed.
You watched me cross from the maze having
returned what was
neither yours nor mine to the many-
fingered rose
window, whose gesture
was as it had been. I watched
you laugh and
cross your
legs as you looked
down to say to yourself
you could not see
stones, and you
unclenched your fists.
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