Once Was Lost
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Once Was Lost reflects Dante's Paradiso in finding the terminus of a journey through the moral universe. It is set on a North Atlantic Beach at sunrise, eating a breakfast of fried clams among the many spirits, living and dead, famous and obscure, human and other, animate and inanimate, who have blessed our lives.
Seth Steinzor
Seth Steinzor protested the Vietnam War during his high school years near Buffalo, New York, and his years at Middlebury College, advocated Native American causes after law school, and has made a career as a civil rights attorney, criminal prosecutor, and welfare attorney for the State of Vermont. Throughout he has written poetry. In early 1980s Boston he edited a small literary journal. His first, highly praised book, To Join the Lost, was published in 2010
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Once Was Lost - Seth Steinzor
Once Was Lost
In Dante’s Wake: Book 3
Seth Steinzor
FomiteContents
Introduction
Bardo
Canto I: Access of Light
Canto II: Two Bearded Patriarchs
Canto III: Partly Occluded Brilliance
Canto IV: Sometimes Like a Particle,
Canto V: The B Side
Canto VI: Wearily Down From a Jeep
Canto VII: In This, You See Progress?
Canto VIII: Venus
Canto IX: Water On Parched Soil
Canto X: More Schooling
Canto XI: Franklin on Eleanor
Canto XII: Eleanor on Franklin
Canto XIV: We Are Dawash Of Akhvilli!
Canto XV: Building The Workers’ Paradise
Canto XVI: Sacrament Of My Grandfather
Canto XVII: A History Lesson
Canto XVIII: Guilty Of Enticing Others Likewise
Canto XIX: A Beat Cop
Canto XX: Bunky’s Tiara
Canto XXI: Places My Morality Comes From
Canto XXII: The Malakh-Hamoves
Canto XXIV: A Pinpoint Spotlit Moment
Canto XXV: The Bird
Canto XXVI: Hear Me Roar
Canto XXVII: Gentle, Motionless Arms
Canto XXVIII: Antiphonal Hymn From the Crystalline Sphere
Canto XXIX: If You Want To See It, There It Is
Canto XXX: Lushens, Engreening
Canto XXXII: Nice Shot, Susan!
Canto XXXIII: It’s Like, You Know,
Notes on the Text and Sources
Untitled
Canto III
Canto VII
Canto VIII
Canto IX
Canto XII
Canto XIII
Canto XIV
Canto XV
Canto XVI
Canto XVIII
Canto XIX
Canto XX
Canto XXII
Canto XXIV
Canto XXV
Canto XXVI
Canto XXVII
Canto XXIX
Canto XXXIII
Acknowledgments
More poetry from Fomite...
This book is dedicated to our children’s future.
Oh, what are they doing in heaven today?
The sin and the sorrow are all gone away.
Peace abounds like a river, they say.
So what are they doing there now?
- Charles Albert Tindley, What Are They Doing in Heaven Today
As the true method of knowledge is experiment, the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences.
- William Blake, All Religions Are One
We live in a plenitude of incommensurable hierarchies...
- Kwame Anthony Appiah
When all the forces in your organism come into play, then life will begin to play around you as well. You’ll see what your eyes are closed to now, and you’ll hear what you’ve never heard. The music of your nerves will begin to play, you’ll hear the music of the spheres, and you’ll listen to the grass grow. Just wait, there’s no hurry. It will come in its own time!
- Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Nanabozho’s journey first took him toward the rising sun, to the place where the day begins. As he walked, he worried how he would eat, especially as he was already hungry. How would he find his way? He considered the Original Instructions and understood that all the knowledge he needed in order to live was present in the land. His role was not to control or change the world as a human, but to learn from the world how to be human.
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
In these idyllic early months of the Revolution there appeared among the Russian people that intensity of human feeling towards each other which occurs rarely – perhaps not more than once in a century – in the history of any people.
- B. Yelensky, In the Struggle for Equality
Omnia mutantur, nihil interit: errat et illinc
huc venit, hinc illuc, et quoslibet occupat artus
spiritus eque feris humana in corpora transit
inque feras noster, nec tempore deperit ullo,
utque novis facilis signatur cera figuris
nec manet ut fuerat nec forma servat eandem,
sed tamen ipsa eadem est, animam sic semper eandem
esse, sed in varias doceo migrare figuras.
- Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XV ¹
Sometimes too I could see that love is a great room with a lot of doors, where we are invited to knock and come in. Though it contains all the world, the sun, moon, and stars, it is so small as to be also in our hearts. It is in the hearts of those who choose to come in. Some do not come in. Some may stay out forever. Some come in together and leave separately. Some come in and stay, until they die, and after. I was in it a long time with Nathan. I am still in it with him. And what about Virgil? Once, we too went in and were together in that room. And now in my tenderness of remembering it all again, I think I am still there with him too. I am there with all the others, most of them gone but some who are still here, who gave me love and called forth love from me. When I number them over, I am surprised how many there are.
- Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
In a perfected sexuality shall continuous life be found.
- Victoria Woodhull
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
- God
Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haoloam,
shehecheyanu, v’kiy’manu, v’higiyanu laz’man hazeh. ²
1 Everything is changed but nothing perishes. The spirit wanders, going hence, thither, coming thence, hither and takes possession of any limbs it pleases. With equal ease it goes from beasts into human bodies and from us into beasts, not in any length of time does it fail. And as wax is easily moulded in new shapes, nor remains as it had been before, nor keeps the same form, but yet is itself the same; so do I teach that the soul is ever the same, but migrates into different shapes.
- trans. by C.K. Scott Moncrieff.
2 Blessed art thou, lord our god, ruler of the universe, who has kept us alive, sustained us, and brought us to this season.
Introduction
This is the third and final installment in my retelling of Dante Alighieri’s Commedia. In To Join the Lost, I described a journey through Dante’s Hell and the changes wrought there by the seven hundred years ensuing since the visit which he narrated in L’Inferno. Also, I observed what has not changed. Despite new denizens, new fashions in old ways of wrong-doing, and misdeeds the saints and sinners of Dante’s day could not have imagined or might not have recognized as problematic, the place remains firmly founded in the familiar bedrock of human solipsism and greed.
Among the Lost recounts the trip’s second phase. Il Purgatorio, the parallel volume in Dante’s trilogy, guides us arduously up the Mountain of Purgatory. Its formerly living inhabitants, deprived by death of the capacity to offend god any further, didn’t offend god so much when living as to be excluded from paradise, but before they get there, they must tortuously expiate the various injuries their misdirected forms of love have inflicted upon their souls. In the seven hundred years since Dante first visited there, Dante’s mountain of faith has been bulldozed flat. A huge, shabby, post-industrial city has grown up on and out of the rubble. Among the Lost tours this sad, confused town. Unlike Dante, who was guided as far as the Garden of Eden by the Roman poet Virgil and after that by his lost love Beatrice, I follow Dante’s heels all the way to a playing field on the city outskirts, where I encounter Victoria, my own first, lost love.
Finally, paradise. In Il Paradiso, having trekked down to Hell’s bottom pit and then up the steep slopes and ledges of Purgatory to the undisturbed peace of the Garden of Eden, Dante rockets thence from planet to planet and beyond through the castes of blessedness, until at last he is granted a direct vision of God so powerful that you can’t help but believe it even if you don’t believe in It. Although the book can be something of a slog for the modern reader due to a dearth of plot development and a surfeit of medieval theology, it’s worth it for these final scenes, which fully satisfy Emily Dickinson’s famous criterion for great poetry, namely, that it makes you feel as if the top of your head has been blown off.
Some readers of the present book, which carries us by a very different route to a rather different climax, may find themselves wishing to know more about characters and events encountered along the way, or about the sources for certain quotations and assertions. For their convenience, I have appended a Note on the Text and Sources which provides information, canto by canto, that may assuage their curiosity. The book is intended to be readable straight through without this apparatus. Having suffered through the infernal regions and then traversed the twisting streets of the purgatorial city, my guides (now consisting of Dante and a woman who may be either the adult Victoria would have become had she not died, someone else of the same name, or both) and I arrive on a beach. There are fried clams for sale...
Bardo
What I notice when the sun rises
is, I’m hungry. Dumpster diving
fed my slog through Hell but failed to fill the
inner me, and though the trudge through
Purgatory was easier, there I found
only what a man might shove in his
face to keep from feeling empty, hardly
satisfying, even had I
had an appetite. Now I’ve got one.
Sand grains roll, cool, under the
arches of my feet, between my toes.
When did I take my shoes off?
I don’t remember taking off my shoes.
Over there’s a tired old school bus,
tireless, axles on cement blocks, a
long, thin, rectangular gash
where its windows used to be, a plywood
shutter raised to shade its length.
Under the gap, shaky red on yellow
drip-fringed brushstrokes announce
C L A M S.
Shouldn’t be open this early, but is.
Dawn carries my head’s shadow inside.
I say I would like some bellies.
Hip pocket. Wallet. Card: belongs to
someone who might as well be me.
On the paper slip I’m handed, I scrawl the
name the card presents us with.
Off the hot brown mound he shoves on the
counter to me, I pluck a body.
Oh. Oh. The thin crust shatters
‘twixt my teeth, gritty shards
freed from the sweet, almost molten flesh.
Into the back of my throat pulses a
tang like extra-sharp cheddar made from iron.
I forget everything else.
Creamy, vegetal visceral mass. Rubbery
anal tube. I chew and swallow.
Parts of me so long neglected praise this
feast; now, I am ready for love.
Canto I: Access of Light
She says, "You may find it helps to keep your
eyes level, loosely focused
on the air a yard or two away, your
jaw relaxed, your spine erect, your
palms up, hands resting on your thighs.
Yes, you’re doing it right. Relax.
Are you sitting comfortably? Begin, then.
Take a breath. Now, take another.
Feel it brush the tip of your nose, cool
coming in, and going out it’s
warm as you are so you barely feel it
join the ocean of air outside you.
Just that little bit of resistance as the
outside air resists your intrusion.
Here is something you can do. Inhale
gently. Quickly force it out,
huff! huff! huff! huff! huff!
forty times, then let your lungs
do whatever they want, and notice the difference.
Lower your chin when you are full.
Hold it. Feel what it is giving to you;
let it find its own way out,
gently; let it go. Let it go.
You may find when you have learned how
lightly breath can come, you are surprised how
little you really need to live.
That surprise will pass. Don’t dwell on it.
Various sounds present themselves. Your
stomach gurgles. Waves roll up the beach,
phssh! phssh! A wire basket
sizzles in oil. The wind strokes your ear.
In the street, an engine rattles.
Each is wrapped in silence. Notice the silence.
Notice your breathing’s rhythm. Notice
silence, wrapping each breath like a velvet box.
Am I doing it right, you wonder.
Notice that. I won’t tell you.
I am going to let you sit with
all those flywheels spinning in your head.
You have witnessed the depths of human
degradation, the solipsistic pit, the
awful poverty of greed, the
piercing numbness of confusion when the
signs the world