At the Public Market

Abandon all hope, reads the hand-scrawled sign
propped beside the lobster tank—some joker
brooding on its murky doom, which looks

more like the world unformed and void,
stirred by a mind feeling that sluggish urge
to make itself known, a mind struggling

into form, water to gel, to claw and tail,
oozing its way out of slime, stumbling
among bottom feeders, grovelers, creeps

all bunched up, feelers adither
over their future's watery inferno.
How innocent Dante seems at first—

trembling and clutching at Virgil his guide,
as if he hadn't constructed that bucket
of dry ice himself, and personally

tossed each specimen in. Such a din
of marketing all around, it's easy
to be wilted by guilt, or to rage at

whoever made this place. But to watch
how lobsters madly scramble, you have to
bend close, look through your own shadow

into the tank's dim algae light,
where a few black beads fiercely eye back—
grabbers and pinchers clawing their way

to the top of some little heap.
And for what? I suddenly have to ask,
trembling, here, in the middle of my life.

-- Betsy Sholl


Blues for Dante Alighieri
       ....without hope we live on in desire....
INFERNO, IV

Our room was too small, the sheets scratchy and hot—
Our room was a kind of hell, we thought,
and killed a half-liter of Drambuie we'd bought.

We walked over the Arno and back across.
We walked all day, and in the evening, lost,
argued and wandered in circles. At last

we found our hotel. The next day we left for Rome.
We found the Intercontinental, and a church full of bones,
and ate takeout Chinese in our suite, alone.

It wasn't a great journey, only a side trip.
It wasn't love for eternity, or any such crap;
it was just something that happened....

We packed suitcases, returned the rental car.
We packed souvenirs, and repaired to the airport bar
and talked about pornography, and movie stars.

-- Kim Addonizio