THE PETRARCH PROJECT


DAVID BROMIGE & RICHARD DENNER



     

CANTO 51




Love who lives in the heart

as fallow lives in the meadow

as kittycat purrs on the pillow

as spouses rock in one boat


breaks out upon such instigation

as She leaves in her wake:

unclad and clad at once, slaked

& unslaked, Magus of intuition,


Odalisque of sexual adventure,

whose promtings bend the bars

so the Love within escapes-

in terror to crawl back to its indenture

or in ecstasy to romp among the stars.

Either way, the heart is built for breaks.


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D.B. in a rhetorical mode. Petrarch himself is unmitigatedly rhetorical, so it's hard to avoid the infection.