The corps of engineers can only dig between sixty-five
and ninety-eight feet a day of the twenty-three hundred
feet. All day we make blueprints for an optical illusion.
We find the surface area and volume of miniature Ames rooms,
and Daniel hands me a cube he made of playing cards,

a labyrinth whose floor is the ace of hearts, whose minotaur
is a willowware angel, herself and her reflection on every face.
I put my head down for just a second, the warm pull on the lower back
and neck, almost erotic, the color fluttering under my eyelids,
hearing myself breathe, being down in the cave of my arms.

Walking a labyrinth was once a unicursal path to god, travel whose
entrance is its exit, born to trap malevolent spirits in a configuration
made in honor of the goddess of mystery Despoine, but mines aren’t designed;
they evolve, and no miner has the benefit of Ariadne’s thread.
The miners are live onscreen all day. We write the word problems

of their cylinder vena cava, negotiate the maze of bloodflow,
pi times the radius times the radius times how tall the tallest is,
only after the food and water math and the measure of rope.
We read the excerpts from the headlines Father of Fractal Geometry Dies,
Math Genius Computes the Blink of an Eye.  

There are variables other than the speed of the drill and the depth
of the hole, such as the first collapse of the gold and copper mine
in the Chilean desert. No miner wants to go first, but on the screen all day
they capsule down and then up and out.  I am the first to surface.