Part 1
For a long time the room had been empty,
Complete with only a small bed.
Then the Hermit had been given it,
During one of his rare visits to the Library of Maps,
And was so possessed by dreaming there
That he had asked to stay on.

Each night he went exploring,
Guided by one of the Great Maps of the Subterranean Passages,
A forgotten and dusty copy,
That he had found on a shelf in the Library.

Entering from a meadow full of wild irises,
He climbed down a staircase
Until he encountered the tunnel,
Waking just as he was about to turn into the first cave.

The next night, he quickly took the same path,
And this time, before waking, stood in the cave,
Lamp in hand,
Looking at the shadowy drawings on the walls
Of pair upon pair of giant eyes.

In another dream,
He passed quickly through this first cave
To enter the second one—
With its painted walls of open mouths.

As time went on,
He sought out a third cave,
And sat there, staring at its empty walls,
And listening
to the sound of its Giant Heart.

In his last dream
(And he was to leave the Library shortly afterward),
The Hermit saw a figure at the other end of this cave,
A woman listening with the same intensity
As he to the heartbeat.

She, too, in her dream, saw the Hermit.

Awakening shortly afterward,
On the island
In the Lake of the Heart,
She smiled, slightly ruefully, to herself,
As she found herself holding in her hand
His Map of the Subterranean Passage.

Part 2
That night, alone, in her dream,
She sat in the Cave of the Heart,
Knowing that the map she had studied on the island
Showed further passageways,
Further caves,
Further darkness.

Were these nightmares she was having?

Some mythic journey being thrust upon her?

An impending collapse of her psyche?

A membrane breaking between herself and a world of increasing war, death, and terror?

Should she go further in her dreams?

Retreat?

Talk to a psychiatrist?

To a poet?

To a politician?

During the next day,
She meditated on the island,
Listening to the heartbeat,
And smelling the roses that surrounded her.

That night,
Sternly composing herself,
She entered the dream again.

Walking through the caves,
Passing the Cave of the Heart,
She came to a space of total darkness.

Though she studied the map the next afternoon,
She could not see where she had been.
The map had faded so much
That it was impossible for her to decipher
what comes after the Cave of the Heart.

She remembered a text from her Catholic childhood,
“ The Dark Night of the Soul,”
And wondered if she should turn
To St. John of the Cross
Rather than to a fading map of subterranean passages.

Part 3
Debating how to navigate further,
She decided to begin
— if her dream would allow it—
From the sea and not from the land.

Among the piles of Great Maps of the Sea,
She found one that told her
How to come to the shore,
To enter the passageway from there.

In dream after dream,
She struggled upward through the caves,
Finding, for the most part,
Debris, collapsed walls,
Fragments of murals,
Fragments of sounds,
Fragments of scent,
Fragments of the presence of others.

After a while,
She expected nothing more,
Expected simply to find more debris,
More collapsed walls,
More fragments of murals,
More fragments of sound,
More fragments of scent,
More fragments of the presence of others,
Until one night,
She came across a pristine cave.

In this pristine cave,
She began to mark the walls herself,
Began to record new sounds,
To create new scents,
And generally to make her presence known there.

She did not know the name of the cave.

There were no references to it
On any of her maps,
But finally it became
The cave she knew most,
Becoming as familiar to her
As objects in her daily life on the island.

Indeed, in a dream one night,
She named the cave,
But waking in the morning,
Could not remember its name—
Although that seemed not to bother her.

by Moira Roth
Written 3/12–3/13/02