Free Where Seas and Fables Meet by B.W. Powe Page A

shaped fictional line.
    The irony is Dante’s visions have transformed our visions of the otherworld. We may try to separate the poet from the eschatology, but it’s hard to do because Dante successfully altered our imaginations to include his images, and the imagination will revise reality at every chance it’s given.

Soul Veils
    The angel visited the struggling poet. He was struck down by an epileptic fit after his conflict with city politics. He’d been an honest Florentine councillor for years. Now he was to be exiled. He was to be torn from his family. He’d have to journey northwards, seeking sanctuaries. He would find none.
    But she visited him and showed him the heart of the world. He would have to move with this heart, and make poetry out of its beat.
    The poet called his visionary work a comedy. He did this, even though his life was scarred by misfortune.
•
    The angel visited another aspiring poet. He was lazy and vague – a teacher who disliked his pupils, a sometimes printer who disliked the process of hot type, an occasional journalist too inattentive to be a good reporter, a stay- at-home who dreamed of travelling the world but rarely ventured beyond the zeal of his burgeoning city’s streets. But through her he found a voice. This voice amplified freedom. Suddenly the loafer caught fire. He wrote and wrote. He didn’t recognize the being burning with life in the words. But he wanted to become it. He spoke to this life, caressingly calling it soul, spirit, self, lover, O and you. When he forgot her, or when he was disturbed by the sufferings of war, he sometimes shrank in his aspirations. He penned miniatures addressing the cramped quarters of
    a troop in a bivouacked tent. He wrote in terms that the soldiers might understand.
    The more readers he had, the more he changed his way of writing for them.
    But when he aged, he began to add pieces to his one long poem – the only one he ever truly wrote – that reflected her absence. While breath began to leave him he called out for her, knowing that she’d already moved on. He wrote goodbyes, more and more only farewells, in the tone and pace of someone already slipping on to the other side.
•
    The angel visited a poet who lived between the new world and the old. An American who chose to live in Europe, he found the shades of the past were visible to him. In the new world he heard only wind across the dusty plain, the wind whispering down empty streets in cities beside a great river and the sea.
    Her visit was short. But he felt her presence in the way he once saw a darting reflection on an abandoned pool whose surface was almost clogged by lilies. He began in his vocation with a love song. He later caught the wind’s desolations in fragments, in Europe. He extended his long poems with minor variations. He ended his vocation with a promise that air, fire, water, and earth would one day – out of time – become one, the quintessence, the heart and soul of the world. (There would be more writings but these were the truest ones.)
    His vision of her was broken.
    Sometimes he remembered her visit as if it had been like a breath over a pool filled with dust. Afterward he felt parched. Then she became the girl who hesitated on the stairs, the girl showered in rain and hyacinths.
    At times he would fold himself back into a shield, dressing in an armour of dark suits and forced courtesies. He tried to become a minister, in a way, but people kept giving him awards for his poetry. The angel left him long before too many awards had come.
•
    She visited the singer when she was young. She had a voice; she already sang of beauty. She was so startling in her gifts that she was herself taken for an angel – though a fallen one, so she sang later.
    The visit increased the charm of her songs. They recalled ancient chants when she moaned and hummed and whooped and sighed. At the singer’s side, the angel