TE23 Double Feature

Tomas Espedal

The Year

his heart beats faster and the blood suffuses his body like heat like joy he laughs. She lowers her mouth to his stomach presses her lips to his skin and cautiously sticks out her tongue tentatively licking his skin and he watches his member rise for the first time.

in my early youth it was in the year 1327 in the month of April during matins in the church of holy Clare at Avignon. And in the same town in that same month of April on the same sixth day at the same hour in the morning

but in the year 1348 the earth was deprived of the light of her eyes. So Laura lived in Petrarch’s memory

She sits astride him looks into his eyes and from that moment they are indissolubly man and woman. On Monday the sixth of April in 1327 Francesco Petrarca sees Laura for the first time.

from the sixth of April to the sixth of April she died aged thirty-four. When he saw her for the first time

she was thirteen from that day on he loved no one but her. Petrarch was twenty-three

In what’s known as the Laura note which Petrarch made on a loose sheet after Laura’s death he wrote: That Laura so famed for her personal attributes and so long exalted in my poems I first set eyes on 124

and for the next thirty-one years he would write his songs to her and after Laura’s death to her memory in the great work Canzoniere which has been called 125