.

What a mad flight,
to penetrate this verbal curtain,
knowing how night lurks beneath each poem
while perched upon its middle ground,
a second-chance-promise at salvation,
is a way of naming roses for their insight into colour,
as if each poet writes in search of such a waiting-place,
art as its reward, Dante's intermediacy, his treasury
of beauty-inspired-by-grace earned by overcoming loss,
a mother quest to fit your Freud, distinctly female,
and isn't that the quintessential poetic path?

Even with his Beatrice so near, guide-confessor-teacher,
it still takes more than Art to paint the hidden corners
in his heart, the gift of tranport beyond fear,
takes moral courage coupled with a visionary love
derived from exploration, a tale of Purgatory and the Poet
unplugged, a sick sleeper tossing sidetoside entangled
by his letters, terza rima pinball machinations
coupled with a quest, but oh! to finally know
his Beloved Timeless Desire and no-more-hunger
washing-white Hell's darkness,
leaving room for light.

If The Inferno is Dante's deconstruction,
Purgatory is his reterritorialization.
But once stripped of all its esoteric trappings,
of specific times and tribes, don't all great writers
write the very same book? Again and again,
a thousand relationships layered onto a single face,
held together by an agelessly transparent film,
by the skin of culture
and by the is-ness
of this moment.

God is a word.