Exegis of La Conversazione (In three cantos, starting with Lucrezia Borgia and alternating between Lucrezia and her brother Cesare)

Aria Ligi’s La Conversazione is a three-part poem that illustrates with brilliance the human dilemma of brother-sister love in the context of the historically documented mutual attraction between Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia. In her poem, Aria captures that Cesare’s way of dealing with the taboo of incestuous desire is to abuse Lucrezia, an inhumane response which he cannot moderate and for which he continually berates himself, while Lucrezia’s is quite the opposite, that is, one that highlights the tenderness she both needs from him and yet nonetheless offers to him as a way to counter, and perhaps soften, the compulsively abusive behavior which is, it is clear, his only means of self-expression other than a biting silence. Aria thus suggests to the reader that Lucrezia may well be the stronger of the two, not only because she is gallantly tender where he is crudely hard, but because she bears an empathy for him consisting, at least in part, of her knowledge that his malady is a predominant desire for her, as opposed to all other women. Lucrezia is cognizant in a way that her brother is not, that they suffer together not only the temptation of forbidden ecstasy but the pain of never experiencing that acme of sexual pleasure, i.e., the consummation of incestuous desire. In short, if she knows that she is the reason for his pain, and is thereby able to achieve both a consciousness and a humanity that escapes him, he is quite unable to achieve such awareness, for he, as Aria portrays him, is the victim of an excessive taboo desire, unabating over time, that largely saps his humanity and disables his higher powers of reasoning in favor of the lust that conquers him and renders him a beast desiring female flesh, save for the last bit of will preventing her rape. 
The poem is presented in three cantos alternating between the two as if a conversation, which most likely never took place between them, suddenly ensued. Through this structure, ingenious in its own right as poetic innovation, she captures the pathos that constantly tortures both lovers. Indeed, Aria’s use of the device enables the audience to gain an inside glimpse not only into their lives but also into their intimate emotive experience. This device enables her deftly to portray their romantic feelings as if they were the steps of a waltz heating to the pace of a feverish sambo, reaching a frenzied climax, and then relaxing back to the movement of a slow dance. The tragedy, which Aria patiently gathers together from the pieces of their mutual taboo love for one another, as intense as any love ever was, is that theirs is a love that could never be consummated. La Conversazione distinguishes itself by interweaving the forbidden physical desire that rips at both souls, producing one effect in the one and another in the other, and at the same time dangling the consummation which both yearn for, quite above the lovers’ heads, and thereby elevating what is ostensibly forbidden to the beauty of the angelically sublime. As Aria writes thus:
Where have [you] been, brother friend;
Just beyond fingers that would hold you,
Into me-in me, constant, though unsettling

-J. John Nordstrom


Where have you been, brother friend.
Never far, never near.
Just beyond fingers that would hold you,
Into me-in me, constant, though unsettling.
I am aware of this distance, it can ne’er be breached.
The waters which divide us stand, house upon the sand,
Glinting, golden cockles about your brow,
Floating wavelet your man-child eyes see me-but do not.

The ache cinches constricting and clawing
Robbing me, raping me, while I stand here bloodied
And the blood, our blood flows like a river
Down the blade.

We don’t think these things, the thoughts themselves
Verboten. Could you have ever said them in my presence
Your hands tremble eyes, London blue, cool as the ocean,
Slip through.

Brimming tears, you dare not shed,
Dread laden -dead.
While my hands and lips would wait forever
For the remittance that never will be.

This would be our final hour.
This would be our last hoorah.
This would be our solo foray into the wave,
Where words are not tainted and love is not stained.

Let us come up from the sea.
In the light of day; let us be brave.

Not brave, no knight stands before you.
Only the mirage -twisted, fright-filled knave.
To see you is not simply torture.
It is my crucifixion.

The curls upon my brow convolve,
Bristles jimmying into the emulsified core,
Where memory waits.
My hands upon you,

Hands that would clasp
And then compound as cement
Into that sweet honeyed nave,
Into your crystal prism intemerate cave.

Or the foot and heel- steel,
Wailing against brittle molded bone,
Crushing the central point- tiny tinder twigs,
Pubic symphysis against your vulva-velvet dome.

Did I do this;
Club, club to rub out what was.
Did I do that thing so hateful to you,
The one most loved.

Or was it desire;
Feeding and nesting on fire,
While with a pitchfork, the stabs came inwardly
Secretly so, though forever without sin.

I close my mouth against the words, lest they escape –
Prisoners on the run.
We scream sanctuary, not from them,
But from the voices huddled within.

In my dreams, it was gentler.
There were no bouts, fists, and feet,
Heel as staves raging in paroxysms
While the room dropped and spun.

In the quietude,
Between night and dawn we lay
The thrum of your beating, thundering warmth
Heart inside my skin.

There you would ne’er voice it.
Nor wink in self -assured acclamation.
Within your breast, certainty beamed,
And the blade was sheathed.

I could hear you low, unafraid,
Though the reckless and galling sea
Pitched and tossed me o’er the railing, heart submerging
Neath the cool black glass tempered pane.

Away, away from the surety of your gaze.
The unsteady rage.
In my dreams, it was a gentler thing, 
And the words themselves remembered.
Not the sour lit craze, 
But the solid glowing flame.
Not the fists shooting death drones 
Into the secret place where Venus reigns.
Not the dusky hours of screams unanswered. 
My innocence deflowered, but the canon writ of love, 
Which in its beauty is silent; 
But not extinguished.

Hammer of God,  © 2018 Poetic Justice Books, and Amazon