Rodney Koeneke
La Chevy Nova
One of the great pivots in Christian history
occurs near the end of canto 27 of Dante’s Purgatorio, a
canto that opens with the pilgrim comparing the dying sky
to Christ’s vermillion wounds (note the ‘sun’
deftly figured here as ‘son’) and the Ebro
and the Ganges, which are rivers,
are empurpled—made royal—by noon
and a glad angel shows up to sing gladly
about the flame that will burn but also purifies,
which our pilgrim by the end of the canto will have to go through
like the muscles behind or just on top of the knee can burn
at the end of a long run, or perhaps (and here’s the pivot)
like the burning some do when they go from a car
at night’s end in a remote parking lot
where nothing is unseemly or sordid
but does in a fashion burn, but also does it purify
as history considered in its Christian dimension must also purify?
Dante, you’ll remember, has spent the preceding cantiche
skillfully working his personal crotchets
into a gargantuan cosmic structure—“I vividly recalled
the human bodies I had once seen burned”—
with his obduracy not once being softened;
yet he manages to nest this ugly effort
in the larger project of turning his passion for the dead Beatrice
into a redemptive program for himself, for time, the reeling stars,
the fishes, the beestes, the air and everything in it
and finally, one might point out, for movement itself
which is seen at the end from its center and revealed as an aspect
of love.
Structure is on fire, and tercets are on fire, and process
is on fire, and motion is on fire; while the poem has learned
to preen and turn, pivot on itself, and no longer hurts, or points
at a world, or even at its status as an internally consistent
verbal object, only at the most tiresome conditions
of its own production.
But I gaze at you and I burn
with a new vernacular; I see you, and I see vermillion,
your color—vermillion in the stoplights
and the stoplights ranged as stars
like the stars could spell out ‘B-E-A-T-R-I-C-E’
and would if they weren’t so dim and talky, stuck
in their orbits where it’s safe to promise love—“it
hurts, but you won’t die”—and you stew in a tepid
amor amicitiae, Socrates spooning
with Alicibiades, warm under sheets
against philosophy’s cold stars:
“It hurts, but you won’t die.”
That even a wound, even now, could make things pure
is enough to count me bitten
returned to the pivoting folds of this world
count me hurt, count me bitten.
Gulls distribute themselves over Oakland’s industrial center
like I leave you, come back to be near you
where I hear their glad song, or watch them scatter gladly
over the beautiful chords of this world;
and beautiful are the chords of this world
with you and everything in it;
Beautiful the Ebro above the phone lines
emitting its fine vermillion into morning
so pleasing to mine and to everybody’s eyes.
So do I live to look at you and so
does everyone: It hurts, but I won’t die—
a little sun, a little wound
“but through that little space I saw the stars.”
The Real Aeneid
Then went down with the ships
then taught at community colleges
taught greek
was talking, teaching, was teaching the boys with eyes closed
talking, then college moved beneath me
professors, goodbye
keep your places while the nation moves
the urban will be visited on rail towns
the rural debouched into metropolitan office jobs
rising in glamour above a large city
the rich and the young are anxious to get drunk in
each winking as if she were happy
and happiness a system
and buildings are a city
and winking is its sign.
Then remembered a feeling of dissolving
which temporarily left this image in my mind:
Pringles, Pringles on everything, fresh junk
confronting October for its reggae
sloe-eyed children breathing gin
syntax moving in fingery legions
expiring like Lazarus, Lazarus, get up
moving in series
history is awful
the peasantry snoring unevenly through it
gloam of time’s dream
Dissolved into a system
that reconstituted me as tears
it’s like I was dead, it was glory
sat next to the ships in glory
inside a fresh body,
presence of eyes.
I didn’t care what theory taught
I was the greeny excrescence
of everything theory had wanted,
the crystal scooped out from the centers of thingsv
a place for the ashes and doves.
Taught greek
as if for the singing world to come into
as if things could speak, and I taught them
rent wildly by them and by the creatures that dance for them
and knew it, knew eternity
shifting inside the zero—
Dido, don’t cry, it’s just sleep.