CANTO 34
I dip my bread in blood,
persist into obscurity
as any voyager
upon the path of liberty
moon or tropic Venus
lays upon the seas
the restless seas.
Worship this woman
flesh & spirit
(the easiest portion unless one is
ungifted, then impossible)
prepared to suffer each surprise
she finds herself
called to inflict.
One loves limits
& adores by rules. The body
imposes of those a whole handful.
Look around-
Di quanto per amor giamai soffersi
Di mi quando tu verrai
et aggio a foffrir anco
for pride & anger must surrender
while one remains a man.
But the ear that I sketched-a black
& white endeavor of a day,
that day my being first drew
in her aura.
I would bend
me-wards speaking as a male
upon whom Love walked,
stepped
in out
bent on Its purposes
that are never our affair
For she in whom our age delights
to marvel at itself or ought
as a plant, its root & flower
triumphs incompletely
till she descends to the caress
arena for the path to spirit
requires a nervous system
held in meat.
Any who looks on her w/o awe
dips his slice of Dante's wood
into a lake of lukewarm lead.
Pink cotton candy in the pine trees
my assemblage looking fine
hanging on my wall.
Dried grass embedded in paper
& dried grass laid on photograph
of dried grass under my sketch
on a transparency and tinted
engraving of dried grass titled
Even this alchemy converting
each moment into the next
forges locks on your heart
had seemed trite & a trifle
in the gloom last night.
Green, crimson, black, or purple
The garment that displays her
Hair twisted in blonde braids
Or tumbled, loose, or drawn
Back from its widow's peak
Light as morning's wing.
Sometimes her hair is braided
And I am upbraided
calling my assemblage
Woman. Not so,
I see specifics. But alike
In that her chest is unlike mine
While between the legs, the way
Leads in, while mine juts out.
The gender differences multiply
so that woman
is an honorable name
& to address one
& just this one
Cecelia,
and for him, Laura
speaks to more.
When, we
Poor mutts, hear her breathe.
As one more day goes by
Headed for the hoarded years
he keeps apart,
& counts
As Vesuvius, I hear,
Believing, never does.
Drawing w/my finger in the air,
does any of this exist?
There's a lot going on,
sitting in a chair in the sun
and the volcano, risky, a steep drive, manageable, but
it's hard to walk just on the toes
of this foot w/o making it bleed.
Oh, boy-who knows,
it may be good for it to bleed,
though not if you're shot in the heart
Or in the gut
and you're lying there
for five days.
This is the Petrarch Project,
and no one is lying around or lying about their sexuality.
What started this?
"It was the semester that I was teaching one day each week in San Francisco,
and perhaps it was reading
graduate students' poems
It was fall, and the thing was
I was getting sicker, my heart
was failing, getting clogged up,
and by the end of that semester,
I couldn't walk up an incline, short of breath, it was just too much for me."
You who scuttle into sound sparse verse suspire
ill of your nude heart
juvenile error altr'uom attend
Various styles raging on this piano
vain hopes, vain sparrows
piango
To prove her ovaries the prime intent of Love pardons us, amigo
perdono mio perdu."
