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  • The Dante Dictionary
  • Brian Culhane (bio)

I take down my copy of the Dante DictionaryAnd look up the names of those put in Hell.I read column after column, turning pages,Scouring their sins. Each arcane history,

Each infinitesimal internecine feud,Guelf and Ghibelline, back and forth,Over sixty-three years. What human drama!Like that sinner who “gives the figs”

To God, his finger rammed into the holeMade by opposing thumb and forefinger.I look him up: Vanni Fucci, whose carcassEternally rises phoenix-like from its own ash.

Noosed around his neck a serpent, for he stole,He admits, from the treasury of San Jacopo;Unrepentant still, he ignites among the robbers.Dante says the serpent’s sting turns his flesh

Instantly to ash, faster than any O or IWas ever written by the hand of man.And Vanni to him: To be seen in this stateBy you is worse by far than any death.

What makes it so? Mere embarrassment?The dictionary does not say. His entry endsWith Vulcan’s son, a hot-blooded centaur,Wildly cantering toward Vanni to punish him.

I must find out soon why this one centaurIs also stung to ash by the fangs of snakes.But that is for another evening’s study,Another myth, another fuming visitant. [End Page 200]

It’s late, time to close this learned bookWith its whiffs of burnt clothing,Its far-off battle cries, its red-letter datesSo unlike my own view of the afterlife,

Which I picture looking like the HudsonIn November, that stretch on Riverside DriveWhere a lone runner used to pass me at dawnWithout so much as a wave of her hand. [End Page 201]

Brian Culhane

Brian Culhane’s first book, The King’s Question, won the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Foundation. New work has since appeared in Parnassus, Southwest Review, Plume, and Slate.

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