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 certained pained

amusement; in time, get so

you would hardly find

it possible to live without

my joke and me.