“Contra Dante (Kind of)” – Bill Coyle

Forget the beatific vision.
Not that it’s not impressive in its glory
and worthy of a god in God’s position,

but if I make it to Mount Purgatory
(and yes, that’s one big “if,” I realize)
and trudge my way up story after story

I’ll settle in the Earthly Paradise
located at the top, it being more,
well, earthly, which is better in my eyes.

Earthly perfection’s what I’m looking for:
the world I know, more or less as I know it,
prolonged, minus the death and gore

(hard to imagine, maybe, but read the poet
Isaiah on the lion and the lamb).
If I found that, there’s no way I’d outgrow it,

even if I grew holier than I am
(not the I AM, but I as I am now).
Can I be honest? I don’t give a damn

if I miss most of the celestial show
(it will go on like clockwork whether I
am there or not) so long as far below

(which, from where I stand now, is still on high)
I can sit down under an actual tree
on actual grass beneath an actual sky

of blue that as it drops back let me see
the southern constellations overhead.
That would be more than good enough for me,

enough to make me not mind being dead.
And if Beatrice came from above
to take me heaven wards, I’d try instead

to tell her she should be the one to move.
She’d hem, she’d haw, I’d bring her flowers and rhyme,
I’d say, “Stay here with me and be my love,

seeing we now have world enough and time.”