Free Dante's Inferno by Philip Terry Page A

had a bad conscience,
    His feet kicked out violently at the air.
    I think Berrigan dug what I said,
    For all the while he couldn’t stop grinning.
    Then he gave me a big bear-hug,
    Crushing me against his broad chest,
    And holding me like this, he lifted me up,
    And didn’t let go until we’d reached
    The top of the stairwell, where he put me
    Down by a glass cabinet containing

    Some pamphlets by Tom Raworth,
Lion Lion,
    Haiku, From the Hungarian
, then after
    We’d looked at these for some minutes Berrigan
    Turned to me and said: ‘Let’s split.’

CANTO XX
    Now I must make punishment into poetry
    To make the matter of the twentieth canto
    Of the first chant, the one about the fallen.
    Already, we had reached that spot from where
    You can peer down into the pit of Al’s Bulge;
    The floor, here, was sticky with tears,
    And walking between the rows of books
    Near Sociology and Demographics
    I saw people go silent and weeping,
    Like a funeral procession in our world.
    When my sight descended lower on them
    I saw that each was strangely distorted:
    Their faces were twisted so that their chins
    Rested on their backbones, and they shuffled backwards
    To go forwards, gazing down at their own buttocks.
    Perhaps there was a case of Freud’s – some forgotten
    Hysteric whose hang-ups expressed themselves so,
    But none that I’ve heard of.
    Reader, if the theorists are correct, you
    Need to be active in the construction of the text,
    So imagine for yourself whether or not
    I could keep my eyes dry, when I saw the
    Human form so twisted, that weeping eyes
    Streamed down to wash their own arses.
    I wept, I couldn’t help myself, since having
    A child I’ve gone soft like that.
    I had to sit down next to one of the
    Computer terminals, then Berrigan said:
    ‘Quit blubbing, the shades in this hole
    Aren’t worth your tears, they’re mostly

    Folk who were so tied up with growth charts
    Or tea leaves they couldn’t see
    What was happening in their own back yards.
    Lift your head up, right up, see the
    Seismologist for whom the earth
    Split wide open while on a research trip
    In Haiti. “Where you rushing off to
    Doctor?” they cried, as he ran for home;
    He kept running till he fell into a crevice
    And into the hands of Landman, who gets them all.
    See how he makes a chest of his back: because
    He wished to see too far ahead he goes backwards.
    And look, there’s Tiresias, the old devil,
    You’ll have heard of him, he changed himself
    From man to woman, altering his bits,
    And later, he had to strike two serpents
    Coiled together in the grass with his rod,
    So that he could resume his man form.
    The next one, with her back facing
    Tiresias’ belly, is Mystic Meg,
    She was a graduate in English at
    The University of Leeds who claimed
    To possess psychic powers – but she
    Didn’t predict the Yorkshire Ripper.
    And that one with her long red hair
    Covering her breasts, and with her hairy
    Parts protruding behind her, was Providence,
    Who searched through many lands before
    She ended up where I was born; let
    Me tell you a little about her history.
    After the death of her father, it’s said, she found
    Herself alone and with a child in New England;
    At that time single mothers were hunted down

    Like witches, so she fled into the wilderness
    Living for some years in the heart of a swamp
    Where she dwelt amongst the Narragansett Indians,
    Learning how to treat sickness with natural
    Medicines, and how to tell when cold was coming.
    Here her daughter secretly married a chieftain,
    But they were discovered, then banished, and with the
    Mother and some servants they set up a new
    Settlement beyond the boundaries of the marsh,
    Where the land was uncultivated and
    Naked of inhabitants, declaring it a
    Place of religious freedom and offering
    Equal treatment to Indians and white folk.
    There she stopped to practise her arts,
    And there she lived
                                     till her 130th