Cosmopoetica Commonplace Book

“In Exile”

Dante wrote his wife, Gemma, about his garden
which grew double-breasted roses & plum trees,
but this was in Ravenna, where he lived in exile
for twenty years. It’s enough to say he knew something
about Hell, but exile is a strange business & memory
is a kind of Hell & longing, too. Which reminds me
of my uncle Jake who worked in a movie house watching
the same films like one of Dante’s sinners replaying
the same crime. Each night he listened to his police radio
in his room off our kitchen & wrote letters to editors
about busted traffic lights & birds starving to death.
When he died I found fifteen shopping bags full of girlie books
& badly rhymed poems about loneliness & unregenerate love.
Dante came out of his room once in a while. He understood
passion & divine punishment & knew there was more to passion
than everlasting fire. Where in his kingdom of the damned
would Jake fit? Jake, who crouched behind his bureau,
rubbing at himself like the sinners Dante placed in a pit,
each damned to gnaw the other’s head for eternity. But
their punishment amplified their lives. There’s transcendence
in such agony. But there was nothing metaphysical about Jake,
who sat hunched on his perch beside the screen, imprisoned
in his blasphemous fantasy & rage. Ah, Jake, a man who cannot love
is forever exiled from himself. His life is his punishment.
Think of Dante alone in his garden where the starry skies
lit up in realms of fire, music & light. Think of him scribbling
his remorseful visions all night, longing for Florence, for Gemma.
In his every word there is the pain of celebration. Yes, beauty lost
is still splendid in its reinvention. But what about Jake,
whose shoes didn’t fit & who cut himself shaving every morning–
Jake, for whom there is no music of the spheres or the forgiveness
of light & who will never again behold the cold passion of the stars.

Philip Schultz
from: Deep Within the Ravine. Penguin Books, 1984.

Entry Filed under: Poetry • Schultz, Philip