The First Quatrains For Patrizia Valduga, Con Amore

 

That lewd Milanese cunt

who’s such hot stuff,

each of her pages

torn from bed sheets.

 

Her lines so bleak and blunt,

her fervent blood spilling

for the one most willing

to sweat in her heat.

 

Each of her quatrains

exclaims exquisite pain --

a cri de coeur

to her amour.

 

After fucking what remains?

You want me to explain

to you what love is for?

Don’t be such a whore.

 

What the hell is philosophy

to you anyway,

you gorgeous poetic bitch?

I’m in your same niche.

 

No matter how lustily

in verse I display

my lines do not bewitch

the one for whom I itch.

 

II

 

“You expect too much of me

or of the poems,” he said,

hearing coffee for pussy,

which, perhaps, he’d rather bed.

 

Jerk, those words don’t even rhyme.

These desperate times

call for raunchy poems.

Screw caffeine. Eat this.

 

I mean, give me a break,

I sure could use a latte

or even a charred steak.

Have you either for me?

 

Sneak them through

the back door then.

I’m waiting for you,

my Secret Agent.

 

III

So what if our libidos

transfer to our intellect -

in this way love grows,

seamlessly, without neglect.

 

If your words doomed you

and your muse, Brava!

Its only what was due.

Cunt or cuntezza, Patrizia,

 

À votre santé!

Note: Latte in German means Woodie, Hard-on, Erection

(Patrizia Valduga’s Quatrains are translated into English by Geoffrey Brock)

 

O Woodsman, You Know Me

The benign beauty of your face

is no “optical illusion.”

Too quickly that phrase

tripped blithely off your tongue,

to my instantaneous confusion.

 

It must have visited there before,

when some other viewer

who, stunned by your allure,

her heart unstrung,

became your ardent pursuer.

 

If love is an act of genius

then why is it so dumb?

If an act of heroism,

why have me so flustered?

Why won’t you succumb?

 

Like Lot’s wife, my glance was my demise.

I was salt before I would realize

what came to pass,

my feelings clustered

in one blistering crash.

 

How came you to approach me?

How came you to laugh at my

adorable little lies,

to be with me so giddy and free?

You drank my songs, my stories

like a man parched

with loneliness or boredom.

 

If you know what you want

then why the seeking?

You love my racy love of beauty,

laughter, justice, sensuality.

But then, you were just peeking.

The rest? You can’t afford it!

 

How came you to match my confabulations

with your

 dazzling illuminations,

relishing the badinage,

the barbs,

bandied between us?

 

Are your elucidations

cruel and disingenuous?

You? A faux-naif?

 

How could a reader so skilled

in apprehension as I

mistake your attentions

felt to me, as impulses unbridled,

as impetuous,

which you deny,

confessing mere pretensions?

 

I, with a mind like a steel tramp!

 

II.

 

Were I to say I do not mean

To ask questions so loaded,

“It’s just my poetic creativity”

Would you blame me?

You who loved speaking in coded

semantics, even when

it beclouded your judgment.

 

It opened a window for you

to reach in, retrieving

your own creative self,

that you long ago strew

on a dusty back shelf.

 

You recognized me.

You got me.

You wanted to know

what I had to show.

 

III.

 

But who are you in the dark of night?

Tree farmer? Woodsman?

Is love’s burden mine alone?

Are you so self-unaware?

Is there no feeling in your lair?

 

You hold a check on your passion.

Because you are too vain

you like your women plain,

soft and yielding.

Instead of giving in to them,

you give in to fashion.

 

Is my necklace frightening?

To you a garland of lepers?

 

To me your voice is

a sensory Babylon,

so hot as spicy peppers

it leaves me few choices.

 

Oh, where is your antidote?

Why are the chances

of finding it so remote.

 

IV.

 

I am no grove, no arbor.

A sylvan,

I grew from a little copse of birch.

Now, I am a wilderness immense, dense

with delirium and dew.

 

Could you not see when you entered?

What? My sycamores blinded you

To heaven and earth?

 

Woodsman, I am no mere tree farm.

If each murder is one too many,

why did you not save me

from the intuitive elm

as you felled it?

Why did you not

shout the alarm?

 

 Summer, 2011

 

For Jurgen Habermas