Translucent contortion, frozen echo of Rodin’s sculptural ode to human intellect, how apt
you twist, before Merwin’s translation of Purgatorio. A gift from Tom, a raging alcoholic,
do you puzzle how English might approach Dante’s terza rima? Or ponder Tom’s trust
marriage will awaken and enliven his bride? Difficult to parse as tercets the warning
in the dream that shook him awake a week before the wedding: wrong music, wrong ritual, wrong wife-to-be. And a Purgatorial allusion of a high church ceremony that strands
the bride at the altar, as Tom dances away with an accordion-playing gipsy lady and her band.

Tom, where are you?
Years after you ignored
Your foreboding dream?
Still visit motels? Sip wine
with your post-marriage lover?
Or plastered, stumbling out
to pick up your children
after a sleepover? Gelded
by lust’s razorblade banister?
Or sobered again by memories
of the guileless devotion
of your two daughters?
Their mother?