If you’re inclined to follow, you might ask, Where are we headed? I respond to anyone who might care to listen, If you’re with me, we’re taking a late train to Midtown. I think of Dante in exile and what would follow if he wandered with us among the constant, rambling madness of the 21st century, while flashes of sunlight and shadow penetrate the train car from buildings we pass along the way. Einstein, as I understand, often worked his theories of space-time with puzzles of thought, a moving train, a rising elevator, each accelerating to approach the speed of light. The train will stop at multiple stations, the elevator at multiple floors, no one knowing precisely when or where, which explains for now why a Florentine from the 14th century can also ride along. Why, when the train stops at Grand Central and the door opens, we step off a platform into a memory instead—Stazione Termini— no longer in the 21st century, but spliced in time to see a slice of Rome, the Eternal City, mired in chaos. Blue morning glories spill from wrought-iron railings of every palazzo. Lazy sycamores shade the streets where women have now, the fall of 1978, piled a blockade of car tires, clogging the width of Via Prenestina. The tires break into flame, thick, black smoke billowing upward over the city like a dark, a desperate prayer. Traffic grinds to a halt as the women stretch their red banner across the street and chant to the car horn’s blare against every deprivation of current housing law. When Mussolini was in charge, the old- timers say, at least the trains ran on time. At an impasse, I think of the next stop, and who we might encounter there, no doubt still more of the homeless. In the eternal world Dante saw them among the badly born, i malnati, finding no place in heaven or in hell, who lived only for themselves, unworthy of praise or censure. But Dante in exile was homeless, as was the Nazarene, who had nowhere to lay his head, and any number of us wrestling still with our own homelessness, glimpsing at times the empty narcissist stirring in the soul—a dead tree standing— barren core with barren limbs reaching for nothing, combing the air for escape from this momentum into exile—the exit that is no exit—only a deepening solitude. Inquietum est cor nostrum, wrote Augustine. The heart does not rest until it rests in God.
Douglas L. Talley is the author of the poetry collection, Adam's Dream (Parables Publishing 2011). His work has appeared in The American Scholar, Cimarron Review, and other journals and anthologies.
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