Pan's Labyrinth

Pan’s Labyrinth

Once upon a time, when the forest
was young, I wandered
through sword ferns and the moss
between my toes to a dream in the centre
of a clearing where a large fig tree
speaks to the grass in an ancient language
and sandalwood, soft as lashes,
rises from the seeping earth.

I took haven here, with the animals of the wood,
in search of a faun who had seeded himself deep
in my forehead.
Curled in a hollow of the fig tree’s roots,
I awoke to find him licking my toes
sometime after midnight.

His eyes were bright as fireflies
crouched in his face of carved bone.

His legs were the shape of a goats,
but had jutted up from granite gripped tight
in the roots of the forest.

His body was gnarled wood, fingers for vines
and when I took his paw my nose
was filled with the scent of musk
and earth.

Into my ear his hard lips whispered
of a labyrinth woven
in the trees through which
I should wander:
to prove the blood of the moon ran white
in my skin; slipped his fingers dangerously
under the collar of my dress
to seek out the crescent shaped welt
on my shoulder, to let me believe
I belonged in the sky.