The Dante Accelerator

The Dante Accelerator

 

1

Poor, old Dante, dead of simple neglect,

Lost in stinking marshes of the Veneto.

There was no magical mold to resurrect

His mortal flesh in the quatrocento.

 

At least he died with the best poetry of the age on his mind.

 

Even today the atomic haze of his bones cannot be recalled;

Only the corpse of his Comedy can be raised for academic repartee

In lecture rooms filled with smoke and blank faces of the damned

Who know it is impossible to frame a world shifting reality

On a daily basis, the new fable circling on metaphors of unseen graces.

 

2

The picture keeps falling out: it rolls

Like a cathode-ray tube out of sync.

Glimpses of Dante float, ascending souls

Or descending on a screen of measured blink,

 

Holding up three fingers for everything

Here or there, or somewhere faintly inbetween.

His truth is historical, something quaint,

Certainly no longer divine,

 

Nothing to support the subatomic ethic of antimatter man.

 

The best we claim Is the rough and imprecise

Uncertainty Principle of Heisenberg;

Uncertainty Is one thing that is certain in the game,

Our salvation raveled out in loose equations.

 

3

Dante's dreams of Hell become Catholic

Compared to the depths of our unknowing.

Forced to forge a chain reaction logic,

There is only the grim undertowing,

 

Experimental, circular machine --

Only pale photographs of tracks left by

Particle souls created inbetween

Millionths of a second to identify

 

Frightening collisions at velocities

Near a speed mere flesh calls light.

 

Yet, somehow, Dante fits. We desire

Close bolgias as a respite from this slight

Reality: at times we would rather be

Standing face to face with a rain of fire,

 

Blind and lost at the Omega Point of

A medieval desert rather than dwell

Uncertain, knowing without divine love

It is forever neither Heaven nor Hell,

 

Only quantum pouches filled with statistical

Mice twitching, at best, probable whiskers.

 

D.A.Adams

(1980)

 

Done