Last Things

Dante’s busy writing, say, the Fourth Canto,
and anything could happen.
—ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

1. Work in Progress

The air in the piazza darkens
around Dante Alighieri
stern, high above us
one hand holding a book,
his nose a dagger
in the blackness

Two nights later I dream
Dante’s body is a falling animal,
he crawls out of shattered plaster
a blue rough tongue slithering
from his mouth, as if
at the end of the world
there is this lizard
who will walk up
some staircase in the dark,
a finished book in his mouth

2. The Quick

Adjusting her sandal, losing her hair,
the four of us at breakfast. Our storyline
feels almost continuous these years later
as if we are oaks lining the road
of a linear village, or within
a posthumous diary.

Strindberg dying in bed felt his pillow take shape,
heard crickets and birds singing within it.
Everything around him felt alive.
Or Agha Shahid Ali before his death
writing in a ghazal,
“Before the palaver ends, hear the sparrows’ songs,
The quick quick quick, O the quick of it all.”

3. Below Dante

I had been alone for weeks when we met there,
below Dante. The three of us lounged in a pensione,
I was writing a book about a dying man.
Twenty years later, you were in a bed,
on Brunswick Avenue. And I kissed your feet,
Connie, one of my shy farewells.

It was your year of last things,
but you were luminous,
within those final fires.

Earlier, alone in that city, I had dreamed
the statue falling brutal from its noble height,
and the poet crawling through plaster,
so near to where we met
in that piazza those years ago.

Now we gather our days together—
the countless meals, laughter and argument,
four of us at vicious canasta
(those small and essential feints),
margaritas, the dancing, and once
drunk in a car on some island or other,
all those small recalls of this and that
before our walk up a staircase into the dark.

for Connie and Leon Rooke, Florence, Spring 1990
—Toronto, Nuit Blanche, October 2008