Modern Love Civ Poem by Liberatore Suffoletta

Your memory emerges from the purple night,
As a stubborn river mingling with the ocean

Abandoned like the dew at dawn by the sun.
Like the rain in the desert, by the red wind

Shower of cold flower petals fall,
Oh cauldron of memories, reef of shipwrecks.

In you the magic and the songs begin.
From you the wings of the doves coo.

You swallow me every time, like a narcotic.
Like the sea, like time. In you all disappears!

It was to be the happy embrace and the kiss.
Your eyes casting a spell like a lighthouse.

Harbor pilot’s dread, fury of a blind lover,
Drunken whirlpool of love, in you all disappears!

In the fog of my manhood my soul blossomed
Winged and wounded. Discovering in you all disappears!

You ride a black horse of sorrow, you cling to desire,
Dreamy ageless sadness shuns you, in you all disappears!

The shadow’s curtain draws back,
beyond desire and acts, I walk on.

Oh flesh, oh salty woman flesh of love,
I am lost in the moistness of the moment,

I raise my song to your vase of infinite tenderness,
and the oblivion you shatter, in you all disappears

The cities black solitude was rowing to Montauk,
and there, woman of love, your arms take me in.

First there is thirst and then comes the hunger,
you are the fruit, the grief, the ruins, and the miracle.

Ah woman, do you know how to hold me
in the soul of your salt, in the sails of your arms!

Green desire so powerful and growing!
difficult and drunken, tense and avid.

Half a century of kisses, fire still in our tombs,
like Virgil's fruiting boughs, pecked at by birds.

Oh the biting mouth, oh the kissing of limbs,
oh the hungering desire of zigzagging bodies.

Oh the mad pressure of hope and fate
in which eternity merges and despairs.

Amid the tenderness, silent as tip toeing clouds.
Among the words scarcely forming on your lips.

You are the pier for the voyage of my longing,
and my orange longing fell into your green pail!

From pillow to pillow you dream, sing, call
Arising like a full moon in my empty vessel.

Deserted like the coliseum at dawn.
Hands whose fingers long to become lions.
To touch with ferocity that languid desire
descending back to earth as thunder:
Oh fingers who wish to become ferocious lions,
Oh mountains whose bleak trails echo love

It is the hour of departure.

You are calling me and in you all disappears.

Oh delicious abandonment!