The Bread of Angels

Oh you who in your wish to hear these things
have followed thus far in your little skiffs
the wake of my great ship that sails and sings,

turn back and make your way to your own coast.
Do not commit yourself to the main deep,
for, losing me, all may perhaps be lost.

My course is set for an uncharted sea.
Miverva fills my sail. Apollo steers.
And nine new Muses point the Pole for me.

You other few who have set yourself to eat
the bread of angesl, by which we live on earth,
but of which no man ever grew replete;

you may well trust your keel to the salt track
and follow in the furrow of my wake
ahead of the parted waters that close back.

-- Dante Paradiso II.1-15,
transl. John Ciardi






THE BREAD OF ANGELS

August 4

A river roared right through me years ago
when a woman’s smile enveloped me
in the drowning sweetness of a kiss;
helplessly afloat and flailing wild
I tossed for years in that venereal wake,
never quelled by high blue waters
enough to slake the inside salt thirst
which rigored me for seaward pourings
in every curvature of night and moon
and moony taste. Slowly over the years
that brutal river cut a chasm down
the rock-hard strata of my soul;
the thrall of soiled nights diminished
and the naiad cathouse slowly emptied
until just one figure remained, a woman
at last, the least numinous visage of that
raging water’s careen in every surface way
but truer furthest down, in the way
love fills a life and makes green days a wife.
Days were ebbed in sight and sound
of that first loud burst of mountain melt
-- no falls in a cat’s porch drowse,
no foam of crinkly need as each
day I stroked my wife’s tired soles --
But somehow the source remained,
flowed on perhaps to its true channel
in the inside augment of all things
from which the happy heart works
and bleeds and sings. This morning
it’s as dry as toast -- at 5 a.m. already
80 degrees, auguring feral heat with not
a drop to fall: and still I hear a gorgeous
booming between far knees,
a startling crisp blue thunder this pen
ejaculates just where that river
flowed under an aged and hardened loin.
Deisre’s just as strange as ever
and there’s not a drop of sea in sight.
I eat the bread of angels here,
feeding dark words to Your river white.