Today’s Comedy
Why Dante in summer?
Why not? The doctrine
of purgatory’s not more strange
than nanotubes or Tang.
I used to know
its ins and outs.
What we’ve abandoned grows
higher than trashheaps
in Naples. My love
canal’s clean and my heart
in my breast
is right dressed.
No guide led me here
but Virgil and everyone
I ever met, in woods
books dreams in suburbs
the city the farm.
Marcus Aurelius
took a page
from the town mouse
and his country cousin.
The lesson of fables
is mutable, their structure
not. Something
must change. A hero
must range in a land
he also unwittingly
charts. If many die
not everyone can.
Odysseus must reach
if not Ithaca
a farther shore
and the little zygotic blip
you once were
must enter the world
& its pure gore.
