AFTER
READING BROWNING’S SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE
Like most of her generation,
she was in love with the
idea of death
and in so loving death,
she loved the muse with a
pale fragile beauty
hidden in the sepulcher of
the Victorian heart.
Only the cliché of roses, abandoned
seven years in a drawer,
moved me
and I wondered where the
real Elizabeth
had hidden herself among the
ruins of antiquity
and whether flesh and blood
ever fed on
the passion of her soul?
Where are the hoarse-voiced
harridans
rasping the edges of night
into dawn?
Or the jilted prayer of garbage
in back alleys?
In the streets of Lisbon,
the men are at their port—
after a long day’s fishing
for commerce—
while the pious kneel their
way
down the long mile to
Fatima’s portcullis—
bloodied knees washed clean in
the downpour.
Where is the Portugal where
faith
drives the engine of the
heart
out of the body into the
realm of forgotten sky,
where indifferent saints
from another era,
who were men once,
complained about the good old days
and how even the faithful
don’t know the first thing about it.
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