Bourbon with Petrarch

If you can taste the oak in aging love,

then no betrayal overcomes the taste

of smoke on the lips and fire in the throat.

You drank some drug that no blood test can trace.

Love asks every thing, but will take nothing

for an answer. How you savored feta,

olive oil, oregano. Your wit rang

a blue note in sullen America.

And if you're gone, I'm not. The love goes on.

It has its own life, eating through the heart,

and heart eats all the world, the sight, the sound,

the scent you left, that I might track you by,

the road we staggered drunkenly to art.

Open your hand. Let you fly, let me fly.

Copyright Credit: Wendy Battin, "Bourbon with Petrarch" from Wendy Battin: On the Life & Work of an American Master. Copyright © 2020 by Wendy Battin. Reprinted by permission of Literary Estate of Wendy Battin.

Source: Wendy Battin: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Unsung Masters Series, 2020)