The Boy in the Labyrinth

Poems

Oliver de la Paz

• Publisher: The University of Akron Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781629221724
• eBook ISBN: 9781629221748
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In a long sequence of prose poems, questionnaires, and standardized tests, The Boy in the Labyrinth interrogates the language of autism and the language barriers between parents, their children, and the fractured medium of science and school. Structured as a Greek play, the book opens with a parents' earnest quest for answers, understanding, and doubt. Each section of the Three Act is highlighted by "Autism Spectrum Questionnaires" which are in dialogue with and in opposition to what the parent perceives to be their relationship with their child. Interspersed throughout each section are sequences of standardized test questions akin to those one would find in grade school, except these questions unravel into deeper mysteries. The depth of the book is told in a series of episodic prose poems that parallel the parable of Theseus and the Minotaur. In these short clips of montage the unnamed "boy" explores his world and the world of perception, all the while hearing the rumblings of the Minotaur somewhere in the heart of an immense Labyrinth. Through the medium of this allusion, de la Paz meditates on failures, foundering, and the possibility of finding one's way.

Strophe

Autism Screening Questionnaire:
Social Interaction Difficulties

1. Does your child have poor eye contact? Does he stare from unusual angles?

Yes. Like a dark bird from a high perch.

Yes. With acetylene torches lit somewhere in the distance.

With eyes wide as the Morpho’s iridescence.

Yes. Wild and hot like fixed stars.

2. Does your child not seem to listen when spoken to directly?

We call it dappled thoughts. He is constantly dappled—

here and not here. He is a thrush hidden in the sage.

3. Does your child have excessive fear of noises? Does he cover his ears frequently?

With wind there are moments—agonies. Like the time

we found him covering his ears in a cement sewer pipe

during a storm or when he fled into the street, shocked

by the vacuum cleaner. Often we hold him hard to keep the world

from flooding in. Often the world is sirens.

4. Does your child seem like he is in his own world?

We mourn him daily. And yet he guides me by the hand

through the threshold of his room as one guiding someone

just off a train, gently and lightly, avoiding the gap between

the platform and the track. The heat from his hand,

combustion-warm. Old stove in which we’ve heated this house.

5. Does he lack curiosity about his environment?

Because the color of the red door renders it mute.

Because the color of the die-cast car is an empty blue

and the sound of our voices could be any possible starling

we are not here. He is not here. And what of the place you reside

if you don’t reside in it? Where then does your body blink?

6. Do his facial expressions not fit situations?

Nulled into a thick disquiet. Mouth agape.

Agate of the eye catches quick the inseam and

no blemish. No, no turning away and no smile.

The contraption shuts its winking gap.

7. Does he cry inappropriately? Does he laugh inappropriately?

A soothing so honed it does not surface

or salvage the daily losses. Which are also sharp

vibratos of hums along the jawbone—the music’s

arrowing shot into the thalamus. A strobe’s command

and call. A conspiratorial ache.

8. Does he have temper tantrums? Does he overreact when he doesn’t get his way?

He is a dark and stabled bull kicking at the chained gate.

9. Does he ignore pain? For example, when he bumps his head, does he react?

If it strikes you can’t rescind it. Juncture to

the brain. Sharp cortical hurt into which

leap charges—synapse to synapse, but then what?

A question asks its question. A hurt insists and yet.

10. Does he dislike touch? Doesn’t want to be held?

There’s something about proximity. The dutiful

belonging of atoms and how we relate to

the world through our skin. The exposed parts

of ourselves and how those pavilions are brushed by

a plum tree’s wicked thorns.

11. Does he hate crowds? Does he have difficulties in restaurants and supermarkets?

Every day he’s praying through the meanwhiles.

The sequences of. Not just aflutter, but alone

he sits on the periphery. Ears beside his little body.

12. Is he inappropriately anxious? Scared?

To soothe, the sound of humming through teeth. And so

a symphony of fears. The ventricular outbursts pleat

the clouds. The sky is always exploding

and in that delirium, a curdled tone.

13. Does he speak the same to kids, adults, or objects?

Remind us of our asymmetries. Who is that again? And what

smile to let the darkness in? I see him speak to the man

in blue work clothes and the way his face yields to

the light. To the way moments like this explode.

14. Does he use language inappropriately (wrong words or phrases)?

The world is a network of minds. Think

of the tongue and the fibers that make

its muscles. The branching capillary network

enmeshed. Alive and cooled with a song

that slides away. Tongue jammed in its stirrup

thinking of itself and the blood-red

amanitas pushed out of the earth.

Chorus: Complete the Sentences

Collapse into the short, ______________ breaths. Something mouthy like a vapor from the empyreal blue fabric, freshly laundered. That is the taste of it. The hydrangea’s bud opens into tongues. Like the little _______________ undoing little buttons, one wound at a time.

A. Parenthetical … pucker

B. Elliptical … sips

C. Sensate … jabs

D. Insensate … thrusts

Episode 1

Labyrinth

The boy in the labyrinth holds a torch before him. He cannot see his shadow, which behind him swims in a somnambulant glaze. Winds tighten around the boy’s body and his torch so that the universe lowers its eye to this den beneath the earth. Blossoms of fire flit from crevasses. The boy thinks, to be guided through the labyrinth is to be guided by bodies filling with light. The universe thinks, there are the stars. There and there and there.

He feels the ball of twine unspool from his hand. The soft speed of its spillage as he walks. He measures it; his intimacy with its heft. The knowledge it erodes as spring water through quartz. Down the passageways, a game of cat’s cradle tugs itself into a bright red web. In the darkest dark, the red twine twists about the corridors. It breathes the way a heavy sleeper breathes. Soon the boy in the dark has no string in his hand. To return to his demarcations is to enter a thicket, to bind oneself to the ligatures of one’s own making. The darkest dark takes a deep breath as the boy’s hand feels for that which sleeps beside.

The boy hears the beast. The pad of the beast’s hooves, quiet vowels sung to a sleeper. The boy listens to keep himself awake. He thinks of spiders on the edges of their webs, the ballet they dance on their self-made filigree. He thinks of an azalea sewn into the hem of a dress. The boy thinks, this kind of thinking led me to the labyrinth. Its black geodes. Its promises of wild crystal blooms held within. Morning digresses into night, and the beast’s song laces its orbit through limestone causeways. It grows smaller and smaller until imperceptible. The boy soon misses the song. The beast’s idle stroll. The faint breeze to remind that there is anything there in the widening dark.

The boy has been following his shadow. He conceives it to be god. And god said genius is in the eye of its wearer. God said the land before us awaits its innocents. The boy thinks he will sleep soon and that his shadow’s tongue is lined with velvet. Above the two, stars and the blue heart of the moon threaded with its meteoric scars. God said this is a maze and your questions are hard. God said there are miracles and there are miracles. The boy thinks he will sleep soon and that his shadow is scrubbing the white from the moon. The boy thinks if he were to lie down, he and god would see doubles. And in the under-light of bright stars they both know the world they live in chooses them.

He is lost. And it is not by chance. He is here to find the beast, maker of accident and conservator of bones. At night, the boy listens to his body. The gardens of blood along his carotid. The march of his pulse into the blue garlands of his wrists. What a terrible place to lie awake and listen, he thinks. Terrible, to be lost within the spirals of the ear. Somewhere, the beast keeps time with its paces, antechamber to antechamber. The sound of his horns rubbing against marble. In a darkness such as this, old countries and new countries die and are born. And the labyrinth’s causeways kiss their darkness, long and hard. Its own eyes shut tight.

The boy falls asleep. At his feet, the lumber’s dying light ambles down the passageways. He is bone weary. The campfire’s cinematic death shifts the landscape into impossible silhouettes. Then out. The ric...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Credo
• Prologue
• Strophe
• Antistrophe
• Epode
• Coda
• Acknowledgments