today

like Galileo
mapping Hell as well as stars
while wearing blackandwhite
and watching rain
slide absence into near-salvation
down the windshield of a wish
for his upturned finger gently placed
beneath my chin,
to lift the head
with smiling eyes,
as if to calculate
the difference inbetween
the one who knows
and one who undergoes
internal architectures,
just like Brunelleschi's dome
and some paperback concavity
found in the Inferno
when reading as a child reads,
moving through the story
at a walking pace
with Dante's terza rima
like a spiral,
wrapped
around each backwards glance
and searching for the New
inside old esoteric secrets
safely kept
beyond a wall of memory
because today
I drove
too far away
from deathless rhetoric
and light