Underground

ALAN SHAPIRO

UNDERGROUND

I dreamt it came on

toward us, far away

in the woods where trees,

receding quickly

deeper into trees,

were a fog themselves,

green tufts and grey

green coils of branch

on branch already

drifting in rough skeins

the fog seemed only

to ravel nearer

now, as if to bear

that dense recession

up to the woods' edge,

and then beyond it,

thicker, through the yard,

and we knew this was

no dream of ours, love,

but a sudden and

irrevocable

waking, underground:

even though we held

our hands out to each

other in that cool

steam, to fend it off,

all we could see was

how the fingers paled

and were gone, and then

the hands, arms, faces;

ALAN SHAPIRO

our eyes the farthest

border it had to

twist through, tangling through

and over till our

every step was still

the same dead center;

the houselight's far-off

uncertain aura

still as far away,

and no one calling

Come home now, children,

nobody calling

back to the dissolv-

ing thread our calls were

through that pallid air.

VIRGILS DESCENT

Not Moses but another Tantalus-

to have been granted this much, and no more:

to see beyond the stream he'd never cross,

near but no nearer now, on the far shore

those hymning veils impenetrably bright

about the gift he was not chosen for.

His only grace there on that blessed height,

as he turns back, would be another chance

to climb down like a body from the Light

slowly enough to see its radiance

shine dim and dimmer in the rising eyes

he sinks past, in a darkening penitence,

down through the fire that scorches till he dies

of being unsinged in that sleight of flesh,

no step of his to lead to Paradise.