“The haunting
poem Pervigilium Veneris is one of those historic accidents that are too
perfectly symbolic to be accidental. It is the last great poem of ancient Rome
in which the voice of Rome is crying out because the god of song has forsaken
her. The romantic spirit was putting out its first buds; but three was soon to
come the long hard frost of the Dark Ages.” Basil Davenport, The Culture of the Roman State
Summers and springs,
drumming and rings—
such are the vibrant
desires
by which our world
lives,
glows, plunges and
dreams
in the everyday sheen
of the pulsating skin,
that canvass and kin
to what’s teeming
within—
the euphoria, the
sadness,
the struggle, the
kindness,
the solitude, the fervor…
the soothing release,
our defiance feisty,
the urge to creation,
once there’s music—
inner music heard,
music being lived,
where love’s the light,
naked, honest and open
as any true light
used to be before.
So was the look
that bent the orb
and halted the clock,
just once and then
so forever drawn
as an act supreme
of bloom and beam
into the soul’s
memory—and
the love within,
with only one
denuding glance,
sheer and spoken,
in which love reads
like a book of poems
from the lost and found,
a palimpsest—unearthed
for spreading our wings
as we read and reach and
race
through its immortal
script,
from the mines and lores
of minds nearly
timeless,
still drunk and singing
of our sacred sonnets
angels nameless run
across time’s frontier.
And we, the writers,
riders of love—past
mere hip-hopping
count as blessing
musical harmonies,
soul’s original alphabet
from our Amor orphic,
flashing out and through
each Genesis’ palimpsests
where the Word’s once
more
a verb of love, verdant
& fertile,
luxuriant, fluent and
vibrating—
Ut florida ver or Venus,
and letters of silence
are again a voice
that makes a difference
between ōidē and void—
as does the Pervigilium Veneris:
“Cras amet qui
nunquam amavit;
quique amavit cras amet.
Ver novum, ver jam canorurn,
vere natus orbis est;
Vere concordant amores,
vere nubunt alites…”
“Let those love now
who never loved before,
let those who ever loved,
now love still more.
The Spring, the new—in
song,
whether its young or truly reborn,
paired and winged with
concord of love”
even through its tuneful, descending rain,
and the world is born in
spring
just as it is born anew in
song.
Let those who love love,
and who didn’t, let them
now—
in truth with their
hearts
for the softest brush
and the brightest paint;
let them walk and wind,
let them meet and melt
in each other’s arms
and rise—through
the ranks of love—
in tendered blush
and purpled white
like a Dione’s rose
from bud to blossom
under an effusive wink,
that little, close-range—
kiss from an eye of hers
through the ears of his
eyes.
Let caress shade and
cover
their bodies’ naked
breeze,
undoing their day above
down to a night below,
a vaguely diffused dream.
Those who never loved
before
might awaken and love
now
and be a living poem—
pressed like a drip of
dew
on a morning silent
leaf,
the world is amorous—
always was and will,
Love’s
ammonite whorl
as it
dives and leads you
to her
freshness ripe and soft,
the
aired & moistened welcome
in a plumped
up, released rose
in the
moored and mellow lights
by spring
moons and summer suns
that
would wish to linger or sit by—
Love
there would roll and sculpt
and
crop the grains and pearls
of live
light from down here or
from
anywhere—be it even
from
the distant, unseen stars
on the
cluing cleft and keening swell
laced
in the blaze of a breathing flower
that
curls her quivered, naked flames.
The
loveless shall die to love tomorrow,
and
the loving shall live and meet again.
One
day you too shall meet again a coup
by her
winning wink that will flutter
like a
breath coined to golden tones
on a
kissed and fingered αὐλός, flute,
the
name of which is also softly linked
with ulice, the Slavic for lane or street
and úl—hive for bees, just as aυλών—
holler,
hollow, gullet, narrow, vale,
channel,
sound, inlet, strait or track,
and αυλή, courtiers,
courtyard,
back garden—are also
other aulos’ kins.
And that passage through
a wink
winnowing grain and
spokes of sound
and seeded, naked light—
for a loving supreme act
from the blanks of
thankless husks
will make
you remember once more
all—all
the good—inside her irises’
prismatic
blaze, in her pupils widened,
black
and crystal, ecstatic and shining,
in
rapture loved—jubilant—delighted.
And so
to the air opened sounds of music
are
what the fonts and springs,
all
those quiet—receptacles of kindness,
are to
silent gardens emptied of the souls
through
which we may stroll, but won’t—
and wouldn’t
notice and wouldn’t ever see
and or
ever hear even Psyche’s trembled wings
once
we carry long dead hearts—void of love,
its
songs and enchantment true and sincere
or abysmally
vacant even of innocent rhymes,
of
those concurrences and confluent meanings
that
are golden strokes, weaving and adornment
to your
life—be it here now or in the hereafter—
retaining somewhere
beneath, down inside
that morning eternal
hush that does—
a wonder to the world of
mine and to
this poem’s verse all
its difference even
as its art, resounding,
syllabic, harmonic
vie and comb and vow
this winter air
now outside as if it too
was or wished
to show itself in your
undone hair—
running through palms in
love fluent.
Let those who love now, love
as before,
and those who didn’t,
let them love now more.
For Amor—my Eros Orphic
and as much—
as Platonic—has been
always slightly only
concealed—spelled,
lightly only missed
off, a tad misspelled—in
everything immortal.
In love’s saving swells—florid, soothing flames.
Through the spirals and
the rollers
of her inspiration
Beauty beckons,
bids and comes—always
prepared,
glad and willing in her
trying veil,
yet with a lasting,
constant invitation
to her chosen few—an
eternal ascetic,
like any solid dame who’s irrevocable,
both decidedly serious
and honestly kind.
For deeper behind all
the outer senses,
behind touch of daily
eyes and scents,
there is another—other
remembrance’s
membrane perhaps—a
supple tympanum,
another arc’s recess, a
soul’s proper
and deeper hearing organ
and tremor
to the spirit’s flow and
rising spring,
liable to awing
syllables and vowels
that versing, an in
silence listened Muse,
brings in us back to
life together—
in notes of love gentle
and poetic making
on earth, yet heavenly
anchored—
like the sacred caught
in white and marble
at the agoras of antique
towns in mountains
that reads and renders
lovers in a key divine
of tumbling tremblance
in their columned,
radiant—once more
breathing temples.
The old ‘tragic flaw’
and the dilemma
is always one and always
stays the same
whatever its form or
clever disguises:
Does love betray the
soul as in Apuleius
or rather in the old
hag’s lie of Psyche and Cupid
where a betrayal is
reversed and dazzlingly painted
which “a pagan would
have found abhorrent”
but which their renegades
have found appealing?
After all Rome eternal
is an image and a mirror
of Hell and Heaven
wherein the two and their
dreams of ivory— war and
wed and revolve
on the piles and pivots
of vertiginous pyramids
made of lives, loves and
desires and their swaps,
decisions and vital truths
and fatal lies and errors
or those tragic flaws
when a want is sold or mistaken
for the soul falling void—to
death for a beastly lover—
through mankind’s
universal, multi-storied forgetting
that the daimon of
Socrates, a mason, is not only Eros,
but Eros Orphic or
Aphrodite Heavenly, that is Urania,
order eternal, a
‘garden’ cosmic arranged in Beauty,
Goodness and the Truth—and
not only Eros daimonic,
in love wise and truly
immortal, but that this Eros,
Eros’ original, primeval—is
also the Soul of all the souls,
the ‘also’ of every
other also—you may think—you may
think of—the primeval
Primavera of all the other seasons,
our Perviligium first
and foremost, God’s eternal Vigil,
a granted privilege to
the living ever or now and here—
deeper among us, to all
the loves avid & manic & godly,
all the loves fired up
and sculpted—in the bloom of wonder,
all the ones seriously
Socratic or Platonically heavenly even.
As music makes love to
the ear, so does the flute to the air,
turning the still and
the unseen into harmony and melody,
into new acoustic aura
and aurora of the rising soul—
the hollow of all the
hollows breathed out of the flutes.
So deep and consecrated
is the shine of eyes in love,
so deep and dark is
their lush and gleam and flash.
Let those who will love
tomorrow, love without ado
now—in ways of
beauty—that would stay and last.
Where trees are
perception and flowers—our insights,
gardens and parks—are
intelligence displayed
to all the eyes into
which love wished to be
caught and also written
and by which too
love wanted to be read
and made and cleared
and freed and taken home
like a long
awaited key to match its
fitting lock,
the heart in trembling
tuned within—
like words arrayed—to
summon a song
whether on a canvass
touched or on a face
radiant with glow and
gladly enamored
as eyelids quiver and
paint her glance
both sore and soaring
with one end—
and its presence which
both the lovers crave.
For here too magick and
musick are still one,
old or even perennial spellings
and compellings
from fates and destinies
with their long and oft
forgotten entailing so
that our souls may once
and then forever awaken
too from their shaded
deaths and deafness when
called upon and hurled
on their way into
existence, the fabric forgetting
frays and tears to
remember to vibrate and cherish
their springs and
summers, seasons to grow,
to flower, to
flourish—the timeless spell of love
so that one too compose one
soul’s poem,
one—beauty at last—one
of all—among
the many—the one one
brings together
with a knowing heart and
with its ear—
life’s immortal fan
repaired & winnowing
notes of kernel grain—from
the casings
and skins of perished,
emptied chaff
to match and honor Eros
and his dress
as we do in chosen songs
and poems,
in art and certain
memorable moments
when we enact Love true
and honest,
uncovered, naked and
with own arms.
The sap of Spring is this
poem’s Muse
who smiled and kissed
and kissed anew
like lines in rhymes
coupled and cupped
or like her charms when
armed in loving.
Through that image and
through that sound
like May through the
alleys leased and given
to bloom and verdant
lush Eros and his Venus
may appear—piercing
through the aging passage,
my time’s folded veil—once
more retained
and returned back—for one
timeless minute,
akin to a fountain
glazing in a sunlit blaze
restored—once
remembered—to a garden
with its avowed grace
and its old meaning
by which Eros, the mania
of us, romantics,
stands and falls and
always lives and dies
for perpetuity—in his endless
Orphic hoops
where all that happens
and all that matters
is, as Apuleius wrote,
strictly in-between
Eros and the soul of
ours and their two
mothers, our two opposite
beginnings—
Venus, the Rose and
Psyche of the Heavens,
and Persephone who
darkly holds the limit
from beneath, a pair of the
alternating symbols
which, in their union,
make all else complete.
Toward such a summer the
sap of spring
runs a windy course and
its errands erotic
to the point of rapture at
the highest peak
where a bud’s flower
makes a way to seed
and love’s misty milk writes
its dedication:
“Let them find a love,
who never loved before,
and let those who loved, love still and ever more.”
For all is silence—till the Siren rises through the dusk.
How long in coming to
the mountain
has been that cleanly
singing spring?
And how long has the light of dawn
remained rayless, gray
and pallid?
Yet love still sings,
even in its silence.
For that silence too is
in the song—
just as the Apollonian
sun resides
in the center of any decent
sonnet.
Adamant and constant—
& armed with an amati spirit
before, in a word or in
a verse,
it too assents and gets
undressed:
“Let those who love now
love also
tomorrow—just as you
teach
the heartless ones the
childbirth
pains of love rising from
the soul—
so that those who love
shall love anew.”
