Two Poems by Merilyn Jackson
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