Excerpt from "Tourist in Hell"

Site Visit

      By then doctors and poets
     Would have found a cure for prayer
                                              --Fady Joudah

A cure for prayer, and the long vigil at the gates,
nostalgia’s broken bubbles in the blood, aneurysm
of a dream; the double helix like a winding

stair, a twisted vine on which the monkeys climb,
(the way up is the way down); they live on captive 
air in the cages we construct—please think

of bleak confinement, steel walls; think of Virgil
by the sinkhole at the mouth of Hell, beckoning,
he points: above on His throne of clouds

sits Majesty in burnished robes, below
the fires roast the burning flesh of those
who must be guilty of what was done
 
to them, agonies it took genius to describe—
didn’t we understand that the punishment fits
the crime? though the damned were from a distant

time: we had to search the footnotes for their names.
Hell is the dungeon where God’s shadow falls,
cast by the monumental, obdurate cliff

that sits beside a restless sea, whose migrant waves
keep eating at its face, pulling it slowly down,
turning the intractable to sand, grain by grain,

motes in the burning eye of sun, while
fish hawks prey along the changing shore;
what breaks upon the broken rocks is spray.

“Site Visit” from Tourist in Hell by Eleanor Wilner, published by The Univeristy of Chicago Press. © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.