Italy is your stage name,
you taught me the sexuality of everything,
blessed my cazzo, my todger according to a lost dialect,
my penis, my North American “dick.”
“Madness,” you say, “obscene.”
Italy, I hid my love for you from the world
and myself—that’s obscene.
Yes, I am excommunicated and I don’t care.
Your body was, is an altar I prayed, pray, and kneel before,
I practice the several religious practices you prefer.
Your vagina is vestal, hearth Goddess of sacred fires.
I entered, enter your sanctuary
with my ignorant pagan tongue.
I worship your fields of poppies under the wheat.
You made a language tasting of figs,
made fica the word for “cunt.” Beg pardon.
I don’t forget the many emperors you had to worship,
but it was good news on the Rialto
when you told me, and I knew you were right,
I gave you more orgasms than any other.
You went to a doctor to find out
if that many orgasms
would give you a heart attack.
There is Pergolesi’s High Mass in you,
there’s commedia dell’arte—
Cavalcanti’s a buttock, Dante another.
I read, smell, touch, taste Dante’s
Paradise, Hell and Purgatory—
in the paradise, hell, purgatory of your vagina.
I crash a celebration behind Ghiberti’s doors.
I hear Vivaldi, Verdi, visiting Stravinsky.
Then there’s your music,
seven percussions with a few strings and piano.
A cello changes the world,
a harp washes the feet of prisoners.
Garibaldi united you—
then wrote Lincoln, offered to come over
and head the Union armies.
Till recently you obeyed the Napoleonic code
which found me guilty.
I had to prove my innocence.
I still want to make a bella figura,
when my suits are definitely off the rack.
Italy, you sexualize everything.
When Galileo looked through a telescope,
he saw the stars making love in the dark,
proof gravity is a clear demonstration
of lovemaking in the universe
that is what we call male, female, other preferences.
Every star clitoral, touches, then kisses a todger,
some erect, a few circumcised.
Italy wishes God tante belle cose.
A Roman in the Catskills, I ache for you,
Italian poetry and prose,
today Leopardi and Montale.
Outside my window apple trees and maples.
I’m a copper centaur, hands tied behind my back,
winged Eros riding me—
how many times have I told you this,
taken you by the hand to the Campidoglio,
shown you my marble Hellenistic ancestor.
Italy, on my lawn I’m an ordinary green garden hose.
I become the fountain in Piazza Barberini,
a triton blowing water from a shell held to my lips.
I write this in an open Italian style.
I am to you another waxed hot red pepper
with a price on my shoulder,
you are to me bell’Italia.
* * *
I loved you from first sight in Taormina
in February 1935.
I loved you sexually before I knew this from that,
ci from ça—I see the Greeks played sacred seesaw
on a red and black bilingual amphora.
Italy, beautiful hermaphrodite
lying face down or open legged,
I see and saw you as a woman.
I wanted to score when I first heard music
on the radio, I think it was a violin.
I loved what I could see and touch,
your harbor of Naples, your Cittavecchia,
Port of Rome. I was faithful
even when I held naked France
in my arms on Avenue de l’Opéra,
I know now when I kissed in France, China, Portugal,
I thought of your mouth. I thrust my todger
into temperate, tropical, and artic zones.
You taught me life begins, and begins again.
There are intervals, five act tragedies.
Sarah Bernhardt’s one legged ghost is in me,
expect thirteen years of final performances,
my La Dame Aux Camelias, my Hamlet.
Buon giorno. Buona sera. Good night.