Il Mio Tesoretto
At an annual reading of Dante’s Inferno
Just
a bit more than midway through my life’s journey,
I
find myself raising Cain at the Cathedral
of
Saint John the Divine. It is Maundy Thursday—
or
Hallow’s Eve for fans of the Infernal.
When
I was just a bit less than a quarter
way
through the same hellish pilgrimage, an aging James Merrill
(alumnus
of my high school) stood like an immortal
Limbo-bent,
before a room of sighing adolescents,
and
taught them how a man makes himself eternal.
Now,
as if to mingle breath with incense,
I
mutter with the cantor, Ah, Ser Brunetto,
are
you here? and make tactile his winded spirit’s omnipresence
through
a shade as ethereal as that patrician ghost’s.
One
reader finishes. Another adjusts her glasses,
declaims
a Medievalist’s Florentine. At my elbow
sits
my own miglior fabbro, Rachel Hadas,
for
whom my alma mater’s James was simply Jimmy.
Under
her chair, wrapped in plastic shopping bags,
lies
a tiny, wood-framed portrait of Sr. Alighieri
she
tells me belonged to him. When at last that maestro moored
his
lithe craft along the verge we make out so dimly,
his
companion found it sitting in a drawer,
and
passed it on to her, who took it home
and,
as if gliding back from the same murky shore,
buried
the little treasure in a chest of her own.
At
midnight, she, in turn, will pass it on
to
me, who will carry it, through this Dis’ divinely comic underground—
by
subway, ferry, rail—further down, like the baton
at
Verona, where the green cloth waves at the foot of the stair
to
flickering stars, and the last man in, panting for Marathon,
crows
like the damned at blank space, through dead air,
to
proclaim himself, if not the winner, there.
