​Paolo & Francesca in a Colder Climate, by Mark Wilson

Paolo & Francesca da Rimini, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (England) 1862

​Paolo & Francesca in a Colder Climate
​
Paolo & Francesca frozen
in relief, in Cam’s colder
climate. Caught askew, still
clutching at the Cyprian’s
prized amulets.
 
You with your undulant, half-
Italian, Janey Morris hair;
and me ventriloquizing 
a 21st Century Vita Nuova.
 
Intertextual, our meetings?
Not really; more like a
manuscript of misalliance,
a bleeding nuisance.
 
Blown out of our parchment
skins at the Picturehouse bar-
cafe: reckless, trembling
at the labials . . .
 
Or were we captioned out?
Agape & gazing at some canvas
or sonnet-block by Dante Gabriel
Rossetti? Left imagining our
twinned mythopoeia?
 
Amor’s dredged-out summer
bleeds us now into the auburn of
early middle age, patronizes us
with sedatives, fine art, fine wine,
these peripheral trappings.
 
Envisioning steely rain outside the
British Museum, as you bent to
cut the ceremonial rope like
a monochromatic midwife,
surrendering me to Lethe’s
thick & soupy firmament, to
yet another meta-fiction.
 
Before you moved slowly,
majestic even, into the
Earthly Paradise
 
alone.

Mark Wilson

Mark Wilson has published four poetry collections: Quartet For the End of Time (Editions du Zaporogue, 2011), Passio (Editions du Zaporogue, 2013), The Angel of History (Leaky Boot Press, 2013) and Illuminations (Leaky Boot Press, 2016). He is the author of a verse-drama, One Eucalyptus Seed, about the arrest and incarceration of Ezra Pound after World War Two, as well as a tragi-comedy, Arden. His poems and articles have appeared in: The Black Herald, The Shop, Tears in the Fence, 3:AM Magazine, International Times, The Fiend, Syncopation, Epignosis Quarterly, Dodging the Rain, Syncopation, Anvil Tongue, The Ekphrastic Review, Rasputin and Le Zaporogue.