"Dante, Dante!"

They used to call out
when they saw me on the streets
of their village.
I was twenty-three years old,
they were seventeen.
Dante! Dante!
they called
because that was the book
I made them read,
all thirty-three pinche cantos
of the inferno.
I can see them still,
all thirty-three boys
from my third-form class
in Benque, Belize.
Heads bent low
over the packets of poetry.
From seat to seat
I moved in the silence,
looking over their shoulders
as they read
or pretended to.
Dante! Dante!
they called.
Maybe they hated him
but I want to think I was okay.
Okay, this gringo doing his year
of service. Okay
in a limited sort of way.
Okay, in the I came, I saw
I had my world
kicked open kind of way. Okay,
in the I could pack my bags
and go home kind of way,
which after a year
I did.
Dante, Dante!
they called to me
while they ran past
hopping over rocks
on the banks of the Mopan River.
I swam too
but not as fast.
I swam alone
not like them,
in schools, those seventeen-year-old boys
from my class now the same age
as my wife. That’s the funny way
of time.
The funny way of poetry
makes memory unlimited.
In those days
I didn’t know to hunger
for my wife
because I hadn’t met her.
I didn’t know to hunger
for justice
because I hadn’t tasted it.
I was thin
as November ice. I knew nothing
and was a teacher.
I was a teacher and I knew nothing
for myself
so I taught you,
Dante.

Dante,
exile makes you sound too fancy.
But you were kicked out of your home.
You couldn’t go back.
You were a refugee.
You know
better than anyone
just because everyone
knows everyone
doesn’t make anyone
safe.

The dogs of Benque
were ragged things. At night
walking home from the school
I didn’t know who to be more afraid of,
their flashing teeth and hoarse barking
or the men by their sides,
in the shadows, cradling their beer,
a glaze over their eyes
that sometimes sparked
if I looked at them
and I’d pick up my pace,
and my heart would thump
a new quick beat
in the dark.
Dante, Dante—
Flash forward ten years
from Benque,
from my third-formers, the Mopan River.
See me writing my own poem now.
It is as judgy as myself,
as full of me.
I see my archbishop’s deputy
chewing on his master’s brain
as your Ugolino
chewed Ruggieri.
I thought I was very clever
to use your words
to paint my church.
I liked throwing the judgement stone.
My picture was important work
I told myself
though a day of listening
to the kids I teach
was better for my soul
than a thousand poems like that one.
Dante, Dante—
All my life
judgement has been more real to me
than Jesus.
Even though I know
his blood drops down
even in to hell,
even though
when he was crucified
the very rocks,
cracked in two
and three
and four.
Dante, Dante—
On one of the last days of class
we read your thirty-third canto,
my third-formers and me—
Ugolino confessing his sin to you,
painting the scene.
How he was trapped in the tower
with his little boys,
how he watched them starve
one by one,
how he ate them up with his own
mouth and teeth
before he died.
I read it aloud
because that was the way
they understood the words best.
I read it aloud
and cried
fat, wet tears
imagining that father,
and the hole
in his heart,
the coldness of the ice,
the love
that wasn’t there.