Adam Patric Miller: Labyrinth

start with my inability
to spell the word
labyrinth
but it turns out
my first guess was
correct yet
I face a wall of hay

to escape I dream
of Dad’s studio the brown
shack in our backyard
that had a hatch beneath his desk
that led down into a dug out
basement of mud walls
spiders and bugs
he told me a story
(he was a storyteller,
a builder of wings
who crossed the sea in ’45)
that people escaping the Civil War
hid down there.
really it was him,
escaping detection
metaphorically, of course

to escape the labyrinth of the dream
(it was a lucid one)
I saw the brown wood walls
of Dad’s studio were rotted,
saw the step to the door was rotted
and Dad wasn’t there.
because my escape from the labyrinth
of the dream was lucid
I knew Dad, like Mom, was dead
the house sold years ago
the studio knocked down
and even the landscaping
the downslope to the backyard
was redone. into the downslope
I dug with seven-year-old might
made a small cave and tried
to dig with fury to the center
of the earth.
it rained and my escape plan
born of feverish daydreams
turned to mud.
our brown one-story house
with one small bathroom
was at the bottom of the hill
of the lane where water rushed
after a good rain

Dad, who could be a monster,
survived a war, had gotten
off a beach of volcanic sand
had killed a man with his bare hands
he told me, before he died
maybe he thought the Japanese man
was a monster trying to kill him
but Dad said, looking back, the man
was starving, dying from dehydration,
he wanted Dad’s canteen and jumped
into Dad’s foxhole

but this isn’t about things dug out
it’s about a maze made of hay
or dream-materials, like Mom
telling me Dad would wake
shouting and I would try to wake
from a reoccurring nightmare
that involved the Devil’s shovel tail
by my bedroom door
(the one Dad shattered)
in the yellow light of that narrow
carpeted hallway that led to my parents’
bedroom. there was a photo of
my great-grandfather Nestor Dreyfus
whose face escaped into my mother’s face
and in the daily dream in the mirror
of our concrete and steel house
I see the same face
the maze of eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth
a code of Jewish identity tracing back
if this is the path I follow
to Alsace-Lorraine and Mom’s trip
to Strasbourg before cancer
made its way and Mom escaped life
as we must

but the labyrinth from which
I’ll escape at the end
is back in Ohio on a farm
maybe it was a newly painted
red for the bicentennial in 2003
but that can’t be right
a wrong turn in memory
because my first son was three
and he was born into labyrinth life
in 1994 in October. so the hay
I face was stacked in ’98
(stack years like you like)
on a farm not far from the brown house
in a suburb of Columbus.
like Theseus I saw the Minotaur
around every tight corner
in the bathroom, in the trees.
what is this polluted love?
god, I would love to tell you
I played the hero—
but I watched my son
enter a farmer’s labyrinth
on a hot August day
and never saw him again

~~~~

Adam Patric Miller has taught high school for 25 years in three states and currently teaches in St. Louis. He is the author of the book A Greater Monster, a collection of essays selected by Phillip Lopate to win the Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize.

Copyright 2025 Adam Patric Miller