Peter Donnelly: An Infernal Intelligence

da tutte parti l’alta valle feda
tremò sì, ch’i’ pensai che l’universo
sentisse amor, per lo qual è chi creda

più volte il mondo in caòsso converso

(Dante, Inferno, Canto XII, 40–43)

I

Shadowy dark spaces
loom and mass:
the interiors of Dante’s mind.

One is predestined to pass

into their inner geographies,
their eschatologies
and eerie permanencies.

The strange taking
and making of shape:

in the fourth dimension
the computer graphics
are malefic

in their contouring
and re-rendering of allegory.

II

One finds in his model –
with its rubbly architectures hewn
from blank imaginative stone –
the fatalistic, the medieval,

and the roman:
riverine, slime, the breaks
in the terrain;
the slops and the slopes

of these Stygian marshes
with their dank
embankments, their
darkened escarpments

landscaped
from the fluid formlessness
of thought.

Introspect more deeply, then,
within his Inferno:
those muddy abysses,
delineated with orribile soglie
which inscribe the plains

and give definition:
incised into the rock-scape within the mindscape.

Into his asymmetrical
mounts and deep descents,
crossings: thresholds
in the unknowable –

the liminal zones,
and the crossings
of the night’s dark chambers.

In the mind there are obscure nether-
regions where the darker
channels and swelling
backwaters cogitate:

from the generative AI
of the nightmare-sphere
comes this fluvial upsurging:

displacement, condensation
of the influent, the latent
dream material unreal.

(A custodian maintains a checkpoint,
detains one there: a threshold among psychic levels).

Hallucinations drift and corrupt
through
such narratives, deep-learned by an AI.

III

The swampy Styx.
The dark
and silent wastes of the Phlegethon.

Nightmarish currents flow on –
malevolent, somnolent,
through divisions in the landmass.

And then the dark forests: clustering
and amorphing;
their blotchings
of dark seem to curdle,

to nourish into one another;
the shades solder,
slow-formed from the black
which extends its macabre gaze back

into the beholder
in an enveloping-inwards.