From The Inferno

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.


Ah, how hard it is to tell
the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh --
the very thought of it renews my fear!

It is so bitter death is hardly more so.
But to set forth the good I found
I will recount the other things I saw.

How I came there I cannot really tell,
I was so full of sleep
when I forsook the one true way.

But when I reached the foot of a hill,
there where the valley ended
that had pierced my heart with fear,

looking up, I saw its shoulders
arrayed in the first light of the planet
that leads men straight, no matter what their road.

Then the fear that had endured
in the lake of my heart, all the night
I spent in such distress, was calmed.

And as one who, with laboring breath,
has escaped from the deep to the shore
turns and looks back at the perilous waters,

so my mind, still in flight,
turned back to look once more upon the pass
no mortal being ever left alive.

- Dante, trans. by Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander

If you've liked what you've seen on the site...

Consider checking out my book of poems, NORTH AMERICAN STADIUMS (paperback version now available).

Published by Milkweed Editions (2018), the book is described by Booklist as “Exquisite…Chambers executes a magic that is perhaps unique to poetry: he conjures a moment from nothing, draws the reader inside, and disperses the spell with something as gentle as a shift in the wind direction, or a quiet revelation…A crackling first act by a promising new poet.” 

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From Psalm 139

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

If I ascend up into heaven; thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.

- Psalm 139: 7-11

David Means, from "Lightning Man"

To get away from Chicago, he bought the old family farm, rebuilt the big barn, installing along its roof line six rods with fat blue bulbs attached to thick braided aluminum wires dangling from the barn’s sides. The horizon in those parts let the sky win. Even the corn seemed to be hunching low in anticipation of the next strike. In the evenings he read Kant and began dating a woman named Stacy, a large-boned farm widow who dabbled in poetry and quote from T.S. Eliot, the whole first section of “Ash Wednesday,” for example, and entire scenes from The Cocktail Party. Nick was fifty now, lean from the fieldwork, with chronic back pain from driving the combine. But he loved the work. He loved the long stretches of being alone in the cab, listening to Mozart sonatas while the corn marched forward into the arch lights, eager to be engulfed by the mawing machine. Behind the cab—in the starlit darkness—emerged the bald swath of landscape.

- from “Lightning Man”, in the collection The Secret Goldfish

Thomas Merton, from "Contemplation in a World of Action"

Take the enjoyment of our daily bread. Bread is true, isn’t it? Well, I don’t know. Maybe one of the troubles with modern life is that bread is no longer true bread. But around here, in this monastery, we have good bread.

Things that are good are good; and if one is responding to that goodness, one is in contact with a truth from which one is getting something. The truth is doing us good. The truth of the sunshine, the truth of the rain, the truth of fresh air, the truth of the wind in the trees, these are truths. And they are always accessible!

Let us be exposed to these in such a way that they do us good, because they are very accessible forms of truth; and if we allow ourselves to be benefited by the forms of truth that are really accessible to us, instead of rejecting and disparaging and despising them as “merely natural,” we will be in a better position to profit by higher forms of truth when they come our way.

- Thomas Merton, from “Contemplation in a World of Action”