Jerome Rothenberg

from A BOOK OF INFERNOS

INFERNO 1

In the middle of the journey words began to change

my hand tore loose from yours
trying to turn the wheel

but growing numb

INFERNO 2

Daylight was going fast the sky awash with stars
like blood or sand

the company around us growing feckless
unable to find a place to rest

INFERNO 3

God is pain
& leaves us a broken door to crawl through
that the wind snaps shut
trapping the mind inside
unable to find a place to rest

INFERNO 4

Limbo

Thunder overhead breaks hard

the more it sounds
the more they run from it

poor prisoners inside
a house of plundered dreams

INFERNO 5

A light that drives them blind they stray abandoned

thinking of the chances lost
of bodies raw & flailing

in a muddy wind

INFERNO 6

Those who have gorged too much are hungry still
never too full to calm their craving

the more they eat
the more they need to
go on eating

INFERNO 7

The dirty lie stuck in their throats like rotted bread
what if they suck it down

what if the ground swells up under their feet
to trap them

Coda

A man with three mouths once imagined
sucks out the life from those he swallows

the privilege of the rich
escaped & safe

the sky no longer
beckoning

who hide behind
each other

driving back 
the dark invaders

they are the final guides
for this inferno

guarding what they build
& plunder

under a black sun
that will lead us

to another world
a gilded hell

the hungry earth
absent a dream

unable to call us home

[From A Book of Infernos, published 2020 by Lunar Chandelier Collective: 34 poems & a coda drawn loosely from the cantos & circles of Dante’s Inferno, “for the infernos & hungers of the worlds around us.”]

Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally celebrated poet, translator, anthologist, and performer with over ninety books of poetry and twelve large assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred and Poems for the Millennium. Recent books of poetry include A Field on Mars (in English and French), The President of Desolation, The Mystery of False Attachments, A Book of Infernos, and Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader; and he is currently assembling a transnational anthology of North and South American poetry “from origins to present,” scheduled for publication by the University of California Press.