DANTE’S CHILDREN

---

The day I saw the Creation of Man,

the musculature of God reminded me 

of lovers. Or if not love: cadavers,

the ones the painter loved to open up,

late, cutting deep into the parts quick 

to yield and those that, heaven knows, were not.

He had to know what feeds, stabilizes, 

links, how skin articulates what we 

do not until we break it.  I looked up,

and saw the science underneath the art, 

and I knew that I could always visit,

I could message the lord of the dead.

Just a touch of my finger, here, so ghost-

light, I cast no shade across the river.

 

*

 

The suicides in hell are beautiful, 

their words music, their suffering unearthly.  

I do not trust them, and still I read.  

Through the effigies of steam, I see 

smoke in mouths where there once there was  

an explanation.  I see a man, bent,

shivering in his chair in the garden, 

the moment before he lay down there.

He had a son, friends whose last farewell 

was anger.  He had a stubborn god 

and the one sin that has no time to be 

redeemed.  Forgive me, friends, I blame

no one.  Not beauty, not you, not him.    

Who am I to cast a stone.  And where.

*

 

When Dante looked up from the page 

searching for a place to cast the souls,

his pen and the finger that it blackened

rose a moment, then he descended, 

then his pen.  It tore the man in half, 

as paradise does when one feels lost 

and longs to rise, and so to turn away.

Perfection made fools of his rivals, 

a lion of his conscience, a jeweler’s hammer 

of the heart that beat his gold into submission.

He was proud, which is to say, alone,

afraid, and as he slept, face down, walking

into the world below, he curled a hand

below his chin, like an animal he loved.

 

*

 

Smoke rises in the theater dark,

so strong, this late, the movie is a blur,

but the bodies are out there, the cries

of bliss, the lamentations of the horn,

romances whose characters are tired

and give a new pantheon permission 

to rise and fall against the broken shore.

Long ago I thought I needed pleasure 

to survive love’s withdrawal, to pull

out the sword of smoke and see the wound.

And then, in hell, I took my place on 

the thwart beside a boy.  I saw myself

in him.  I saw him.  I looked away.  I

saw a shiver of stars on the vessel floor.

 

*

 

If you believe the sermon in the distance,

the sorcerers in hell’s torture chamber

lead a twisted life, heads on backwards,

buttocks blowing the trumpet of arrival 

like the angel carved at the prow of a ship.

In other words, hell is funny, funny-

strange, funny ha-ha, and thereby cruel,

if merciful, with anomalous reprisal.  

Remember Simon Magus, how god-like

he flew, then Peter prayed, Simon fell

and suffered the fatal rocks of the crowd.

So magic works, just enough to kill,

if you fly, say, or pray a man to death, 

or stoop to something equally inhuman.

 

*

 

The spiritus mundi of the modern age 

bears the epithet of what we cast.

Less a net than an ocean, a nation 

of no one, and yet the grave of all.

Our power is selection, so why waste it. 

I think therefore I cast, I listen, I hear

the howl and siren and carnival tune,

the writhe of the catwalk and junkie, 

the runaway child looking for connection.

I see the center that is everywhere, 

the circumference that is nowhere, 

not a god but the shape a god abandons.  

I think therefore I am a wave laid 

in the waters that are a water’s grave.

 

---

Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-five books including, most recently, Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (L.E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, 2018), Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse, 2018), Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019), Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU, 2019), and The Calling (Parlor, 2020).  Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas.