Questo Muro

Quando mi vide star pur fermo e duro turbato un poco disse: "Or vedi figlio: tra Beatrice e te e questo muro."
- Dante, Purgatorio XXVII

You will come at a turning of the trail
to a wall of flame

After the hard climb and the exhausted dreaming

you will come to a place where he
with whom you have walked this far
will stop, will stand

beside you on the treacherous steep path
and stare as you shiver at the moving wall, the flame

that blocks your vision of what
comes after. And that one
who you thought would accompany you always,

who held your face
tenderly a little while in his hands---
who pressed the palms of his hands into drenched grass
and washed from your cheeks the soot, the tear-tracks---

he is telling you now
that all that stands between you
and everything you have known since the beginning

is this: this wall. Between yourself
and the beloved, between yourself and your joy,
the riverbank swaying with wildflowers, the shaft

of sunlight on the rock, the song.
Will you pass through it now, will you let it consume

whatever solidness this is
you call your life, and send
you out, a tremor of heat,

a radiance, a changed
flickering thing?