Thinking about poems as labyrinths. Thinking about poems

Thinking about poems as labyrinths. Thinking about poems
as churches or architectures, as instruments
that divine the motion of stars. Thinking of mantra
and prayer, of word and name and of the graphemes

that make up calligraphy. Thinking of choreographies
in libraries, semantic puzzles and lewd riddles
encoded in nonsense verse. I'm remembering the beloved
in song and rhyme, in scheme and trope, without

an anthropomorphism or an extended metaphor
that dazzles the reader. I'm thinking of conceits
as docents in the elaborate museum of time

that we're wandering helplessly. O love remind me
of the world before sense, of the undistinguished stuff
that constituted the real before any man.