On First Reading Dante's Paradiso

ON FIRST READING DANTE'S PARADISO

I used to wonder: did he write this from a kind of goldenness
that welled up in him the way tears well up in others
and there I was in the collegiate sunshine reading blinding gold.

to anyone else it would seem I was quiet there
with my bookstore paperback copy of The Paradiso

in the Ciardi translation

on my own as we had no course on Dante then..

the walls dissolved around me and I was stunned

at the flights of such language the architecture

of it in a kind of vertigo

of dizzying light echoed and reechoed 

like a honey accrued outside of time

 
and there were divine suns everywhere

a multifaceted design
catching the woods on fire and beyond the perimeter

of our small school and the St. Louis sun made obeisance
to the several ones and then disappeared
and there was soaring as in the Icarian mode and yet redeemed

and music falling through several atmospheres
while we moved from star to star in the Immovable
the Only True Heart

and if anyone had come up to me in the student cafe

and asked, do you forget where you are when you read
after a dazed moment I would have answered: yes.
you cannot imagine how much.

mary angela douglas 27 november 2017;16 may 2024