the
insegnamel1to
of grace
from instincts not yet too corrupted
by the pain of life
but since life in a world ill-governed
is a life of pain
the love exalted by Dante
was a love unconsummated
and tangential to daily life
His Beatrice survived by dying
What use was knowledge of that love
to Milton's first marriage
or T. S. Eliot's?
So from love
at aile with reason
(but not with the world)
the Elizabethans and Romantics
turned to its opposi te
rejecting the stairway to heaven
in favor of this life
they explored the grandeur
of love as obsession
the kind of headline-maker
that leads from opera
to bad Hollywood movies
as if this were progress
and not a return to the passion
the Buddha warns about
I cannot claim total ignorance
of desires which shamed me
even as I surrendered to them
(my wild eye fixed
