When my mind lingers too long in the dark, 
I think of the salt mine at Wieliczka, built 
eight hundred years ago a thousand feet 
underground, and of the workers 
who toiled there months and years at a time 
by candlelight, who after hours carved chapels 
so they could pray, salt-crystal chandeliers 
to light them, who carved statues 
of luminaries of their day, kings and queens, 
popes and artists, Copernicus, Beethoven, Goethe, 
and saints whose feet and hands are worn away now
from centuries of kissing, a project vaster 
than any single life could complete, a cathedral
that commenced Roman, then Gothic, then
Renaissance, and ended Baroque, I think how 
the human heart is an underground labyrinth 
filled with chambers, how history is murky, 
lopsided, and literally dissolving, how 
a tour guide instructs visitors to lick the walls, 
and most unbearable, I think of the horses 
lowered in by harness, then bred below, 
who trod in circles to work the pulleys 
that raised and lowered baskets of supplies 
from above, salt mined from below, 
the beautiful horses who, while workers 
chipped their stories onto every surface, 
wordlessly spent their whole lives underground.