The One and the Many by James Miller

Most lunches I visit the taqueria. Today,
I’ve waited a half-hour for my chilled
tostadas, pored over the Parmenides—coiled
serpents of being, the one and the many
lapping each other’s saliva-tongues
like debauched Pasolini honor guards.

What are you reading, the server-trainee
drops, sitting alone at the table ahead
with his menu-manual opened halfway,
half-memorized. Plato, I answer. Hold
the book up in its crisp dust jacket. I expect
him to say something like, is it good?
Do you read a lot? But he is more interested
in his own discovery of Dante’s Inferno.
A friend gave it to me, he says. I’ve just started.
His eyes glaze, then clear: I’ll bring it.

He disappears into the break room, where
(I assume) he’s pulling the paperback
from his workbag. Returns just as my plate arrives—
I push it aside to flip through the text. This is
a 19th century translation, I tell him. Is that good,
he wants to know? Sure, of course. There will be plenty
of thees and thous. It will sound old and brown-
veined, but nothing wrong with that. He turns
to the introduction, thumbs its summary of the action.
Cantos— what are cantos? They’re sort of like
chapters, I say. In this poem they take you down
level by level to the deepest, costliest sins.

I want to add: Be sure to keep going, sprint
past Longfellow’s city of Dis, tarry not
with the traitors and hypocrites, burrow
in borrowed wit when the hells are cold.
Don’t leave yourself unfinished, unshod,
counting on the church-van’s grudging tips.

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James Miller is a native of Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in Cold Mountain Review, Lunch Ticket, Juked, Meat for Tea, The Atlanta Review, and elsewhere.

Photo: Daniel Schludi