If he could solve the riddle,
she would not leap
from those gaunt rocks to her death,
but devour him instead.
It pleasures her to hold
him captive there—
to keep him in the reach of her
blood-matted paws.
It is your fate, she has often
said, to endure
my riddling. Your fate to live
at the mercy of my
conundrum, which, in truth,
is only a kind
of psychic joke. No, you shall
not leave this place.
(Consider anyway the view from
here.) In time,
you will come to regard my questioning
with a certain pained
amusement; in time, get so
you would hardly find
it possible to live without
my joke and me.