Vittoria Colonna

four poems

VITTORIA COLONNA :

I saw her die and did not kiss her brow

So from this life, male in its first motion,

Yearning ever for male, the motion goes,

And men who die more frequently than women

Never learning to die with a woman's ease.

You drop, a willing city, below the horizon,

Gable remembered, naive bell-tower dissolving;

Men fight covers, grasp nephews, curse the physician.

They bungle, inept in all, dying and living.

Before and after birth men lose before women,

And life, choosing the male, ever the loser.

You who spoke well and above the birds of omen,

Now pillowed on adders tell the adders your pleasure,

Now rimmed on the wheel, tell the rounds of pain

You marked in transit, under the eyes of men.

I, who sent this fur blanket because you sniffled,

Work in the cold chapel, the fingers swell double,

I groin them, blow on them, rap them on the scaffold.

Vittoria Colonna was a sixteenth century Italian poetess and the center

of a noted group of writers and artists, among them Michelangelo.-

Ed. note.

I do not elect like you to love turning marble

Though marble I turn, and I turn finally now

From marble I never turned and shall outlast.

I saw you die and did not kiss your brow,

I was jealous of the chaste skill of your frost

And feared you most perfecting beyond my hand

A form small for me, brief, and somewhat common.

David is lost, standing the rain and wind,

Empty of beauty to bend like a limp woman.

I go to my several deaths among my cold lives.

Look for my fist in the burst of your bright leaves.