Now Beacon Now Sea

In Dante’s Vita Nuova, just a few poems shy of revelation, after the horrible mid-text death of Beatrice, the poet watched a young woman in her window, through his window, where he was set to read and write just as depicted on his tomb, each hand in a different book, and he saw in this woman’s disposition a grief symmetrical to his own over her own recent loss of a similar kind, and in the illusion of shared grief, he began to love her with a welling, alien, wanted and unwanted love. What emerged was a voice embarrassed, hovering in exile from itself, the poet of love and death, the pilgrim in the forest.