"Love that converses with me in my mind, he then began, so sweetly that the sweetness sounds within me still." ~ Dante asks Casella to sing; Purgatorio, Canto II, Lines 112-114 [3] Sunrise, airy on ivory sheepskin— Botticelli has sketched the scene of a hundred souls arriving on a boat ferried by an angel who tips them out as the vessel runs aground. What's hell, or even this purgatory, if it isn't brushed with fire or tinted with the darkest hues of suffering? And these beings, stripped of their usual garments for swifter conveyance from our more familiar world of trappings, supposedly are singing. A kind of choir, stumbling into the pale light, asking for directions; unsure of what they've been told—that waiting is already a kind of salvation— for it's hard to imagine a sweetness withheld or yet to come. And so, when the shade of Cato shouts in rebuke What is this negligence, what lingering is this? still, it's such agony to peel away from the warm nest of arms that so freshly embraced them; from those that beat their breasts or tore their hair as their beloveds passed through the watery veil, scattering like flocks of birds.