I found this stirring

"We open the successive doors in Bluebeard’s castle because
“they are there,” because each leads to the next by a logic of
intensification which is that of the mind’s own awareness of
being. To leave one door closed would be not only
cowardice but a betrayal—radical, self-mutilating—of the
inquisitive, probing, forward-tensed stance of our species.
We are hunters after reality, wherever it may lead. The risk,
the disasters incurred are flagrant. But so is, or has been
until very recently, the axiomatic assumption and a priori of
our civilization, which holds that man and truth are
companions, that their roads lie forward and are
dialectically cognate….We cannot turn back. We cannot
choose the dreams of unknowing. We shall, I expect, open
the last door in the castle even if it leads, perhaps because it
leads, onto realities which are beyond the reach of human
comprehension and control. We shall do so with that
desolate clairvoyance, so marvelously rendered in Bartók’s
music, because opening doors is the tragic merit of our
identity."
-George Steiner

Timepiece

that old
frog-eyed glutton,
cinereous stubble
spanning the topographies
contiguous to a
stern half-pockmarked
proboscis and I wonder
what he'll say when
I ask him
when
we must meet.

Claudia Jean

O maximal Madame X
of apple-almond eyes,
without a conscience
or conscious thought
I would savor you as
the wind greedily licks
off willow leaves in
their deciduous winter
weakness. I would become
a certain Norgay only
to climb your yew,
shout from atop your
auburn peak, and ask
if you would so kindly
(in the midst of spring
hecklers, birds, bees, etc.)
be my loveliest autumn.