I Dreamt I Was Dante

by Brett Rutherford

I dream in mezzanotte silver-gray,
donning the robes of aging Alighieri,
sandalled and aching with brittle legs,
heeding the call of Thanatos,
waking or sleeping?
I do not know! I feel the dew
as on my ankles, but these feet are numb,
the bony knobs and claws of an exile.
My limbs are brown and scourged
with years. An umber moon,
senile amid the drooling clouds, tilts
earthward and winks at me,
the knowing eye of eternity,
changeless and blistering.

A cypress grove, its rippled leaves
cat-furring the rigid columns of sky-
supporting trunks, the blue drear tears
of trees unbearable in daylight: how cool
they are, how wise reflecting in dew-cups
each one the tiny faces of moon and Venus
(so must we mortals, in mirror'd shields
look on the Gorgon face of Love!)

Among the trees, close-packed, a maze
formed by the slab-walls of quarry stone,
blocks of an unfinished temple to gods
the fall of an empire extinguished,
now a limestone catacomb roofed by a vault
of stars. The maze invites my errant feet
to tread its ever-regressive avenues.

At the far heart of the stone-cypress maze
in a niche cut out of purest marble,
on a pediment of onyx, Beatrice waits.
She is already dead, and I will die
before I can ever find her resting place.
That is the journey, and there is no Virgil,
and although I have read him, his silver lines
fade now to dust motes in my memory.