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17 f r o m s c r a p w o o d m a n g u i d a n c e w e h a v e n e e d o f . . . in winter enjoy. Blake Late winter afternoon sliding by in silence. This delight of reading Bill Merwin’s Purgatorio, the notes especially. The text being sometimes so settled in the politics of Dante’s Florence I lose interest. I find a mistake. A note for Canto X should read 2nd Samuel, not 2nd Kings. The passage when David dances before the ark. Dante says that David’s dancing makes him both less and more than a king, a condition we have no single word for, the fool in his glory. I was given a word in a dream recently, frontiseratory. I move to a dictionary , then know something else for sure, that I can be given a word in a dream, but I cannot look it up. Though I can and do when I wake, in a Latin glossary. Frontis, the face, the forehead, the emblem across from the title page, what is apparent to others that I cannot see, what I can know with blunt fingers. This naked device, this guidon I carry through town to draw sidewards across a pillow. There is a lot of attention to face and forehead in the Purgatorio, the most beautiful being at the end of Canto I when Virgil spreads out his hands and lays them on the grass that is soaked wet with dew. Dante sees what his friend is about and leans his face near to let Virgil wash the tear stains and restore the color which their journey through hell has drained. I want a friend like Virgil to wash and restore my face with hands dipped in cold sopping fresh dew. I have had in the past such friendship walking with me through the smoke. Now pure absence looms like wisdom that wears this form out as it tries to find and give others these ablutions. Let the reader make now the familiar two-handed gesture of wiping his or her face in a cleansing release from wherever we just were—near-sleep, prayer, reading, the leaning-back of a winter afternoon. So this then is purgatory, where we finally weep to be purified and begin to become the empty expanse we see is next. ...

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