Bourbon with Petrarch

--Wendy Battin

If you can taste the oak in aging love,

then no betrayal overcomes the taste

of smoke on the lips and fire in the throat.

You drank some drug that no blood test can trace.

Love asks every thing, but will take nothing

for an answer. How you savored feta,

olive oil, oregano. Your wit rang

a blue note in sullen America.

And if you're gone, I'm not. The love goes on.

It has its own life, eating through the heart,

and heart eats all the world, the sight, the sound,

the scent you left, that I might track you by,

the road we staggered drunkenly to art.

Open your hand. Let you fly, let me fly.

Poem from ‘The Canzoniere’

-- Petrarch--------------------------

Breeze, blowing that blonde curling hair,

stirring it, and being softly stirred in turn,

scattering that sweet gold about, then

gathering it, in a lovely knot of curls again,

you linger around bright eyes whose loving sting

pierces me so, till I feel it and weep,

and I wander searching for my treasure,

like a creature that often shies and kicks:

now I seem to find her, now I realise

she’s far away, now I’m comforted, now despair,

now longing for her, now truly seeing her.

Happy air, remain here with your

living rays: and you, clear running stream,

why can’t I exchange my path for yours?