What Diotima Didn’t Want to or Couldn’t Tell

 

“She will certainly go about seeking
in whom she would beget …
for she will never beget in anything ugly.
And she must think this wild gaping
after just one body is but a little thing …”
—Symposium 209b, 210b

“More beautiful, more immortal.”
—Symposium 209c

Some moments are worth the wonder
they engender, and of which some will
make then among us songs or books —
and such spells of marvel invariably come

when some face or neck, a curve, a shoulder,
make widened eyes at what they promptly spot
as a Stradivarius of a deep and soaring yearning
that just buds or ripens, rounded already, even,

to yield out of his soulful violin geometry, sheen,
with unworn varnish, a shock from a shell, a Muse.
And a few of them thus know that there are ways
to catch an eye still not lost to beauty and still

not barren, mute, in which the immortal finds
its strings to play and to become brilliance;
once there she is arranged — grandly set
and so dusted off a confined, outgrown coat —

as if she herself were to be a new Il Cannone.
So what does she do? Somehow she has to let
herself come near — one time, a few times at least —
for each note needs a fitting place and rhyme.

Then a display, an amply and yet briefly conjured
summoning charm, a nod to all-out agog blossom,
a crown of rhapsody and rapture, a jolt of vision,
as if carved and cleared — into divine amethyst!

Just as no one could stay sober when Socrates tried
to prove that authors ought to know of hearts
that radiate and resonate with love and romance
to the point where speech and speaker may brush

and kindle a string to be pecked and plucked —
when all that truly is is found and present
and soul-streaming as a released, rising fount,
and each — now a Pythoness reborn on a ring of verse.

Audition for a Long-Lost Inside Sense

 

Just as simple touch is drawing
a probing barb—backward first
in order to secure what is forth
and, without retreat, out of reach.

And that touch thus treats all that is
as furtherance, a never-finished
and yet ever-polished face,
in a game of what feels soft,

alongside a pausing solid,
waxing loose and amorous,
to appraise, audit all her ears
as long as inclined, willing.

Paramours thus dip into much,
forgetting their heels and hands:

“Would the garter stop me—
stop me from seeing anything else?”

And amid such trance of induced forgetting,
like travelers at the sight of ancient busts,
they tap and open another long-buried sense—

and remember—

what nothing else will count.

Thaumaturgy of a Decent Dragonfly

 

A large dragonfly whipped by my window
and, on a swing, she chose her repose
to spread a frothiest shade of black,
a gauzy game of her ready arms!

Glad and restless to raise ardent whirl
with legerdemain to take one’s breath,
catching fair dreams of iridescence
among sunbeams with her winging fan.

There she thus sits, finely spreading
a translucent charm—just as opaque—
turning beauty into mist and daze.

O that lissome whim of willing yearning!
O that little wounding wraith! What hoses
can she pull—on her clearsighted play!

Apollinaris’ Morning Walk

 

Smoke of morning rays
caught in gauze
of ebbing mist —
thus in unison all

quivers and dithers
on time’s inmost cusp,
waving through the eyes
on a wizard’s wand.

Come and see yourself
this brief séance
so carefully dosed

so that a pharmacist
and an artist appear as one —
with an act of delicate shock.