To Ariadne

I am your elder lover.

I know not what to say.

What image could recover

your manner and your way?

For what is like you, who

are colored like all things,

Taking their colors to

the dark quilt of your wings?

Should I describe your speech,

whose thousandth part might be

Fractioned again, and each

more branched than any tree?

When nothing that you are

speaks openly or free,

How may so dark a star

be gauged by one like me?

My elder mistress, you

resemble but one kind:

The winding of the clue,

the labyrinth of mind.

Frederick Turner

From April Wind, © 1991.  Reprinted
by permission of University Press
of Virginia.