Variations on Some of Dante’s Last Lines

By Norma Cole b. 1945 Norma Cole

And move and hold back

entering by the highroad through the words

and fall like a person hit by sleep

arriving at the place without light

And fall like a dead body falls

and find there the great enemy

and come to a tower all of stones

such that through it the earth opens

We pass between the martyrs and the high walls

even up there water is pouring out

then turning and fording again

sling the noose from the roof of the house

And each and every vapor spent

over winning and not losing

in which it stands caught out

fleet then catapults like a stone

Filling our view

whereupon another valley is revealed

Source: Where Shadows Will (City Lights Books, 2009)

Biography

Norma Cole is a poet, painter, and translator. She was born in Toronto, Canada, and attended the University of Toronto for her BA in Modern Languages and MA in French. Her translation works include Danielle Collobert’s Journals (1989), Anne Portugal’s Nude (2001), and Fouad Gabriel Naffah’s The Spirit God and the Properities Of Nitrogen (2004). She has also edited and translated Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France . . .

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