Among the Lost

By Seth Steinzor

Among the Lost, set in the modern American rust belt, is a meditation drawn from Dante’s Purgatorio. To Dante, Purgatory was the mountain where souls not damned went after death to cleanse themselves of sin in preparation for entering Paradise. What, Steinzor asks, are we preparing ourselves for, having lost the fear of hell and the hope of heaven, in the course of our daily urban existence? And whatever that is, how do we go about preparing for it?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fomite
• Release date: Nov 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781942515654

Seth Steinzor

Seth Steinzor protested the Vietnam War during his high school years near Buffalo, New York, and his years at Middlebury College, advocated Native American causes after law school, and has made a career as a civil rights attorney, criminal prosecutor, and welfare attorney for the State of Vermont. Throughout he has written poetry. In early 1980s Boston he edited a small literary journal. His first, highly praised book, To Join the Lost, was published in 2010

Book preview

1

Bardo

Three quarters of an hour with nothing to do

but fall. The fabled fall from grace

has shafted our world’s heart; and where it drilled

we fell, eighteen thousand miles

an hour through the place beneath all places;

one weightless instant; slowing then

concurrently with increasing ponderosity;

hovering − just at that moment when my

hundred ninety pounds eleven ounces was

poised and ready to drop back down the

---

bottomless pit, Dante said, Here it is!and

flung an arm around me like a

lifeguard saving a drowning swimmer and yanked me

sideways where instead of bashing the

tunnel’s rocky wall I landed ungently

face down, kneecaps sorely scraped on

hard-packed dirt in utter blindness. I wondered,

when I’d recovered enough to wonder,

why he’d plunged me into this cave, not knowing

we had turned towards the light.

2

Canto I: Arrival

We navigated sightlessly, by feel,

and not only fingers but shoulders, elbows,

and jarringly twice my forehead supplemented

Dante’s This way! and Over here!

and Mind that drop-off to the left! in stumbling

forward through the rocky tunnel,

until, negotiating a series of switchbacks,

we began to meet unbaffled

photons bouncing towards us. The merest hint of

visual tone gave form to the blackness,

---

insinuated, Here’s the next turn.

So it was, and the next announced

itself a bit more clearly, and the grey of the

next held discernible textures and tinges

my starving eyes rioted among.

Soon, ahead, a yellow oval

poured its honey on us, and the memory of the

bitter, murky shades below

thinned and paled; so rich, that light, my body, my

sense of my body, thinned and paled; my

---

feet no longer felt the dirt beneath them.

This memory bobbed to the surface: a

summer night, the cottage’s porch lights’ amber

streaks each side of the full moon’s silver

bar that crossed the pond to pierce me where I

floated, on my back, night-dazzled.

These lights, blurred through half-closed eyelids, shift and

now I blink and here I am. A

floor lamp turned low glows in the corner.

At the other, darker end of the

---

couch, a table with lamp and magazines that

no one’s reading. Dominating this

small, square room, a hospital bed. Upon it,

her body dominated by

her belly, lies a woman giving birth.

A nurse is checking her dilation,

and, although her husband’s fingers also have

entered her there, his tender inquiring

exploration did not probe so deep or

so insistently. She groans.

---

The husband, suddenly weak-kneed, totters from his

station by her shoulder, where he’d been

offering ice chips, caresses, and encouragement.

Slowly, he descends to the couch as if

someone had let the air out, closing his eyes when

his wife groans again. He does not

see the nurse withdraw her latex-covered

digits, glance at him amused, and

whisper to the laborer, Not yet. But soon.

Which he does not hear. The nurse,

---

leaving the room, reflects on the weakness of men and

how her feet ache despite her new sneakers.

The room is quiet. The mother floats adrift

on waves that always recede just at

the moment they are about to overwhelm her,

and each one is bigger than the last.

Over her terror and fatigue she rides,

exhilarated, her mastery constantly

threatened. What came so slowly bursts upon her.

During the months of advent, she had

---

endured her body becoming a stranger’s body:

heavier, hungrier, breasts enlarging

as they hadn’t since she was sixteen,

aching back, the urge to pee;

lying in bed at night unable to sleep and

gazing down her rolling torso

at this eminence, this nunatak.

Now she must expel a self as

intimately alien as her dreams, a

process she’ll describe much later,

---

when she’s asked, as shitting a watermelon.

Feeling he should do something

when the nurse is gone, the husband resumes his

station by her shoulder. Massage? She

does not want to be kneaded. Whispered endearments

piss her off. An invitation to

breathe in rhythm elicits a sharp, You’re hovering!

Fearful of her anger, he stands off

from her bed a bit and, stolid as a

coastal rock, he breaks the waves she

---

flings at him. So the nurse, returning,

finds them. This time, the father stays put

(but looks away) and fortitudinously

bears the fingering and the groaning;

congratulates himself upon it, knowing

no one else will. The nurse says, Now.

He moves to his wife and takes her hand in his.

She clutches tight. Relax, he says,

and put the effort where it counts. She nods,

slowly, once, twice. Her fingers

---

limpen. Then the tide returns, the surf is

up, it’s Malibu and Fundy

all at once. She rides enraged, exultant.

Push! Push! the others urge.

It maddens her more: after all these helpless months, these

hours of being told not yet we’ll

tell you when, as if she needed to be

urged at last to act, to be.

Eyes wide, she glimpses Dante near the ceiling,

thinks that he’s her long-dead dad.

---

Bearing down. And then it ebbs. The husband

lays a damp cloth on her forehead.

Quiet, empty minutes. Energy running

through her body begins to fill them.

This time, she is readier, greets it calmly.

It thrills throughout her thighs and groin

and belly, gathering force beyond the fiercest

orgasm. Huff! Huff! Huff!

she and the husband gasp in unison, and

he begins to cry at the little

---

he can do, while she, with an athlete’s timing,

catches the swell at its awful crest, her

every muscle wrapped around and squeezing

back against this being swelled

within her, howling now at the very end and

sobbing because again it leaves her

unfinished. The husband thinks her cries mean pain,

and hurries to dampen another towel.

When he returns, the next one’s just beginning.

So it goes, eleven times more. The

---

nurse is counting. The mother’s lost in rhythm and

sweat, her long blonde ringlets lank. The

husband metronomically swings between her and the

sink, redampening washcloths. Her strength’s on the

ebb, she feels it, but at the same rate now she

finds her groove: her body calls and

she responds like a gospel choir to the solo,

oh! such power! hallelu!

So her will is joined to the greater will that is

also hers, eleven times, and

---

on the twelfth the crazing pressure rends her

barely wide enough, it burns! She’s

torn! She’d rip herself in half to tender this

life! And in the widened hole

between her legs, a hairy moon appears,

glistening, smeared with blood. The husband,

summoned down there by the nurse, who’s touched by his

mindless devotion, watches it wax and

wane (but only partway back) behind those

straining purple lips. Oh god, he

---

moans, It’s here! It’s here! Well, not quite yet. A

grey-beard doctor arrives on the scene and

takes command (no one’s sure who called him)

from the nurse’s relinquished position

crouched between the mother’s knees, alert as a

quarterback awaiting the snap. A

sizeable village has passed through his hands, but he’s still

eager to welcome each new arrival.

The husband watching over his shoulder, the doctor

says, A few more pushes, giving

---

signals the mother neither needs nor wants. The

next wave crumbles something in her;

on the next she feels it giving way a

little more; and next, the dam is

broken open, worlds rush through it, a chaos of

feelings so turbulent they cannot

be distinguished from each other swirls and

floods down every artery and

nerve to the site of the making and out of her with a

great, Oh, god! and washes her baby

---

through the arch and portal, sliding to the

doctor’s educated fingers.

Next thing the husband knows, the nurse is handing

him a pair of scissors and pointing

where to cut. He hesitates just barely

long enough for me to put my

hand in his and feel the strangely tough and

rubbery umbilicus –

shiny, red, blue-veined – resist his steel.

Perhaps he glimpses the thing I see.

---

The cord we only seem to have severed entwines

unbroken with countless others to form

the ruddy trunk and branches of a tree,

the forest’s tallest, and each strand passes

through the bodies of women, and from these nodes

men hang like leaves. A firmament

of ornaments festoons the upper branches,

our little room among them. I am

clinging to this vision like fall’s last apple

resists the drop. The room is clearing.

---

The gray-beard doctor, gathering purpose about him

like a cloak, hurries off.

The mother surrenders the baby to an aide, who

disappears with it. Then she’s helped to a

wheelchair the father slowly pushes away,

both of them smiling, wet-faced, and drained.

From these tears you could grow flowers. The nurse,

ending her shift at last, follows

close behind, and, passing through the door,

notices that her feet don’t hurt.

3

Canto II: Dressing for the Occasion

Unto us a child is given, I say.

The rest is commentary. Go study,

ripostes Dante. He opens the birthing chamber

door with his left hand. His right hand’s

sweeping gesture ushers me through to the hallway’s

startlingly brilliantly shining floor,

which my feet touch as gently as falling

soap bubbles. I’m barely allowed a

moment of wonder before he conducts me into a

harsh-lit room with sinks, and mirrors

---

reflecting the battered toilet stalls behind us like

paintings made surreal by what is

left out – me: I’m absent, though I’m there,

figured in furious brushstrokes of grime and

rags he now strips from me, saying, "Don’t worry.

No one who comes in here will see you."

Then, with paper towels tepidly moistened and

jets of liquid hand soap, he dabs the

awful accretions off my body, gently and

thoroughly as the nurses dried the

---

baby half an hour ago. As he’s

tying a hospital johnny around me, the

tatters he tossed in the corner shift and rustle.

A scrawny rat emerges from them.

Dante pounces, grabs its tail and swings it

thock! against the wall. "Did you

collect a souvenir in hell?" he asks, the

corpse dangling from his hand.

I nod, and confess, An oven mitt. He smiles.

"Even the finest wool of Satan,

---

once you bring it here, is merely verminous."

Into the trash goes my purloined keepsake, and

to the wall goes Dante; he passes through it,

just like that, a cloud through a sieve.

Then the door swings open, pushed by him, and

into the hall he beckons me,

cleaned and refreshed and increasingly mystified.

Can I do that, too? I ask, "that

walking through walls thing? Yes and no," replies my

mentor, "I commend your prudence,

---

asking for knowledge you more painfully might have

gathered by your own devices.

On this stage of your journey, pedagogical

reasons you may understand – but

only after the lesson has been learned –

counsel loosening all the ties that

straitjacket you within that organism

you are used to suppose is you.  The

change was wrought there in the tunnel from hell, while

you were preoccupied, distracted.

Thus, in this attenuated state, that

part of you retaining awareness

floated to the birthing-room floor, slow to

respond to gravity’s grip; and less than the

sun’s full spectrum and power will not suffice to

illumine you to mortal eyes.

Walk through walls?  Oh yes, you might; and

you might waste this tutelage, like

Caliban, whose only profit by the

gift of speech was he could swear.

Beware the thrill of incorporeal fribbles!

Victoria won’t be found in them, and the

time you have to find her will be lost.

But, of course, you have free will."