whores of 'il passione'

 
it’s like an old Italian movie. he’s a brooding fisherman, who carouses
with the men in the café, where the smoke drifts in its blue melancholy.
they tell fabricated stories of outrageous sexual encounters, & the  
name they speak most often is her name, but they call her la bella
bandito  (the beautiful bandit).
 
sometimes he smells of his work, but the curious girls & the unfulfilled
wives of the village come to him anyway.
 
when she visits the café to purchase a decanter for her incarcerated  
father, the men watch her legs & the arrogant plumpness half contained
in her peasant blouse. they make lewd remarks in undertones; she  
sneers & informs them exactly where Hell is, & that they should go there.
 
but there are things she does not speak of: how she cries on humid,
sleepless nights for the reckless girl who gave up her virginity at fourteen,
or the murderous episode when she was raped in a bombed-out church
by a gang of Ethiopian soldiers.
 
he’s a drinker who smells of his labor, who is educated in the dirty ways  
of laying with bruised angels & prostitutes, & no woman should love him.
 
she is a damaged woman: it’s that remarkable damage that makes her
beautiful.
 
they meet in secret, in a town where there are no secrets. when they  
remove their clothes, their bodies are, in some places, desirable, & in
some places, hideous. he is rude upon her compelling ardor with his  
hands & mouth. she moans profanities along with his name, & she  
opens like a rainswept flower. a flower of the moon.
 
‘in my drunken & wicked years,’ he tells her, ‘ I’ve taken the kisses &
embraces of Catholic girls, of good but wayward women, & of harlots.
they come to me to have their loneliness abducted briefly by the terrible
things I do to them, & I have not the will to give them up. but when I’m  
with you…’
 
shut up, my lover & killer. just….. shut up.
 
they commit upon each other’s body & heart these merely unpoetic  
plebeiancies that a man & a woman do. they do not know how to
translate love  –  except by sex…
 
 
(Artwork: Ars amandi)