These three Dante-inspired poems and architectural note are from Murray Silverstein’s unpublished collection, which The Dreaming Machine hopes will see the light of day soon. The cover picture, courtesy of Melina Piccolo, combines the Cigoli drawings of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore ( made about 100 years after Brunelleschi accomplished his feat) and Gustave Dorè ‘s engraving of the 9 circles of Paradise.
AN EXCHANGE
[A curtain rises on two chairs. Albert Einstein and Dante Alighieri enter from opposite sides of the stage and are seated.]
Dante: Where to place you, Albert? When “God,” you asserted,
“does not play dice with the world,”
Paradiso, I thought, for sure. That heaven
where, by grace of your imagining, space and time are one.
But the Princeton years and all that baffled noodling,
certain the quantum couldn’t be real, cry, Purgatorio!
On the terrace of doubt, your faith a labyrinth
through which you failed to chalk a trail.
Einstein: I’m honored, Alighieri, by your dilemma,
having found myself at times, at large in all three realms.
When Time named me, Father of the Bomb,
I wandered for years in Hell, my only solace
finding in your Inferno Ulysses there as well!
“Brother,” he called to me from the flames,
“we weren’t born for brutish ignorance,
but to ask a beam of light, “What’s real?”
Poet, in your quest for order, I saw myself:
to know the light all things emit. Your Beatrice,
my Bohr, figures we created
but could not subsume. Nothing but in death
to let them live. Alll of us guests
on the mountain, eyes on the fountain of bliss.
[Long silence. Then Einstein continues:]
In my Commedia, E I fear must stand for Hell.
Where chains of opposites grind and burn
the bomb is always near. M, my mass, is like
your mountain, bent to the pull of gravitas.
And C, of course, is light, the photons
God’s sprites, born of darkness, and squared
to make of time a space: O sad paradiso,
our Constant: to love uncertainty, ineffable mother of night—
[Dante listens intently then turns and stares into space. Einstein leaves the stage, and returns with his violin. As the lights go down, he plays: Mozart, Sonata 26 in B-Flat, KV #26.]
DEATH HAS GIVEN ME TIME
a blurb for the revised edition
Death has given me time to read the Divine Comedy
and I find it a tonic. In hell, climbing the mountain,
aloft in paradise, our struggles are framed by its music,
the pulse of each rhyme. The terza rima is a hold
(as I’d hoped for my couch): the A-B-A, B-C-B
both centers each moment yet offers more life.
And I, who in life couldn’t carry a tune,
was suspicious of music, the lies it contains,
find myself stunned on the terrace of pride,
and recommend its singing cure: La Divina Commedia.
In exile built, of exile made—call it the Third Temple.
May all have ears to hear, eyes within eyes to see.
Our song of songs of sort. Death has given me time.
—Sigmund Freud, author of The Future of an Illusion
LAST ENTRY*
Ravenna, 1321
While still an infant—so I’m told—my mother pronounced me a poet.
Foretold, she said, in the Gemini sky.
This told by my father, as she herself had passed
before I knew that stars could tell.
Now, my Comedy complete, I find it odd to think
before I could tell I was told.
But so it seems, and in other ways as well.
Florence made me, gave me her genius,
only in anger to cast me out. I skewered her
in my Inferno, so, from exiles she might learn
you cannot unmake what’s Florentine.
A boy, you see, I’d wandered her streets,
watched the masons build her walls:
O unto o,they sang to the stones, wheels
made of wheels, the songs of our Tuscan tongue.
(Language, you made me! But then I, you.)
One spring day, I must have been eight or nine,
and infused with the joy of morning light
I found my way to the ruins, where guildsmen
were picking the old church clean. Go,
said my father, see! He’d read to me the Commune’s decree:
On the ruins of Santa Reparata, a temple
shall be built, largest in all of Christendom.
Its dome greater than the Pantheon of Rome.
I spent the day there, watched the apprentices
clear the site, stacking the sulfur-stinking stone
barged down the river from quarries; watched,
and more, I helped! gathered the bones unearthed
from the site. Of the ancient saints, they said.
They had—the apprentices—songs of their own.
But so did the bones! was the secret I learned—
dirges, laments—and truer to this boy’s ear
than those of the church. A happy time!
Remembered here, in malaria-ridden Ravenna,
the Paradiso complete, my Beatrice gone . . .
(And what was she ever but a shade
that burned inside my song?) Was I cleansed
by poetry’s flame? Who can say. “No greater pain,”
I let my Francesca in hell reflect,
“than to recall a happy time in misery.”
And yet, still love’s scribe, let me learn
at last to love what, before he vanished,
dear Virgil called the tears in things.
In even, he said, the most distant stars.
*A Note on “Last Entry”
Perhaps because I was an architect for forty years, turning to poetry in my 50s, I find it compelling to imagine the boy Dante wandering the streets of Florence, soaking up the physical place: what it was, what it wanted to be. He would have seen the old medieval walls being torn down and rebuilt to enlarge the city’s perimeter, to redefine and renew its relationship with the Tuscan countryside. And, most intriguingly, he would have seen the city’s ancient cathedral being razed and heard the decree that a new church was to be built, its dome the largest in all of Christendom—a dome that could be imagined, but which no one then alive knew how to build.
Dante was born in 1265. The site of the crumbling old Cathedral of Santa Reparata was being cleared when he was a boy; the basic design for the new church, with its ambitious, unbuildable dome, was underway in 1290. The years of the Commedia are roughly 1305–20. The Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, with its magnificent dome, was completed under the direction of Filippo Brunelleschi in 1436.
As author Ross King points out in Brunelleschi’s Dome, Brunelleschi was a scholar of Dante, and “. . . the dome having been built ‘circle by circle’ is not only a reference to the method of bricklaying or the series of ascending circles that compose the [dome’s] two shells. It is also an allusion to the Divine Comedy, where Dante uses this exact same phrase—di giro in giro—to describe paradise, which is envisioned as a series of nine concentric circles.” The direct influence of Dante’s poem on Brunelleschi’s design is reinforced by a fresco by Domenico di Michelino on a wall inside the cathedral that depicts Dante holding an open book of his poem with one hand, the other gesturing toward the entrance to hell beside him, the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory and Florence behind him, and the layered domes of heaven above.
I think of the Divine Comedy, written in exile from the city he loved, as Dante’s “architectural” vision of what Florence wanted to be, the great dome its centerpiece. If there is another epic poem with the architectural perfection and intricate beauty of the Comedy, I don’t know of it. The staggering complexity and unity of the work is without equal. It’s as if the power of development we experience in the entire cycle of Shakespeare’s plays is presented here in a single astonishing form.
The poem and the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, I like to think, are one. Neither could exist without the vision and genius of the other.
Red Studio (2024) is Murray Silverstein’s third book of poems from Sixteen Rivers Press. His first collection, Any Old Wolf (2007), received the Independent Publisher’s Bronze Medal for Poetry and was followed by Master of Leaves (2014). His poems have appeared in Rattle, ZYZZYVA, The MacGuffin, The Brooklyn Review, West Marin Review, Plainsongs, Nimrod, and Under a Warm Green Linden, among other journals. The senior editor for two Sixteen Rivers anthologies, America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (2018), which received the Independent Publisher’s Silver Medal for anthologies, and The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (2010), he also directs the Sixteen Rivers Press Youth Poetry Project, which has published three chapbooks by teen poets: Anthems (2022), Dear Earth (2023), and Our Own Light (2024). A practicing architect for forty years and coauthor of four books on architecture, including A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press) and Patterns of Home (The Taunton Press), Silverstein lives in Oakland, California.
