While you in Italy study cherubs,
at Autumn’s first slap of season’s colorful cold,
the Swiss goats hunker in the run-down shed
Hanoverians shelter on the eastern slope
and the Scottish red Angus
imported for our Appalachian highlands
bed in the lee of the creekside berm.

An Italian art student permits your admiration
while she crosses the windswept Piazza San Giovanni.
You love how she moans in Italian as you seduce her,
sliding your tongue into her wetness.

più profondo

she growls profane demands

oh Dio mi scopare ora
oh Dio mi scopare ora

compliant as a Mafioso whore
when you plunge into her with your fingers

adesso
adesso

to increase her orgasms.

She accompanies you
lover and tour guide for ten days.
the director shooting scenes
an Indie film becomes a Renaissance tour
grand operatic palaces
a movie-made masquerade.

Winged cherubs float on pink and gold clouds
painted on the vestibule ceiling
amused, flirt, exchange kisses
watching from three floors above
human comedy that could not be missed
passing through carved oak doors
parading across the black marble floor.

On the entry’s circular staircase
restored wall colors flash fat cows, calves, huge bulls
fields of rain sweetened grass
ardent sun ripens grapes
ancestors float, like Marc Chagall visions,
in the vineyards.
Ducal estate vast
celebrates a family’s past,
in history’s motionless air.

Artistic enshrinement you plan too
for your hide-away manor in the mountains
she returns with you to paint your bedroom ceiling –
Italianate pastoral contentment
plump child two and beautiful witnesses from on high
your majestic red Angus bull
first place ribbon Hanoverian eventer,
a black field labrador, loved and lost.
Clouds cascade out of the western sky
topple over eroded hills.

Paint barely dry
you decree evening on the mattress,
a celebration.
She paints you her nude model in your bedroom.
You disrobe
she follows with preview
brushes her own nipples
a Tik Tok Tinder scene
then her mons
dips the brush’s soft wet hair into her scent
gently draws across your swollen lips.
You pose on a three-legged wood stool
your hands grip its unpadded seat.
She strokes colors wet as kisses on your breasts
with brushes’ heads made of soft natural woman’s hair
lashes your ass with brush ferrule
slaps paint ‘til you beg relief from the pleasures
a polychromatic Italian Aphrodite in your pagan lust.

You command me to watch
tie me to a high-backed Bishop’s Chair
you bought at yet another antique shop
you strap my wrists with bathrobe sashes
to the carved arms

I cannot touch myself.
you forbade my participation
you motion me to silence
as your arousal under her colorful strokes
engorges my envy.
My Bishop’s Mace is indeed now only ceremonial.
Your every pain every pleasure
you deliberately impose on my view
you whisper
you glance
your voice is raw with guttural imploring
for more you say
is revenge for the suffering you experience in Italy
your longing for our love’s rough sex unfulfilled
as I labor back home at your own country estate.