Novum Pervigilium Veneris et Eius Luci Aestatis et Primaveras (New Orphic Manifest)

“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

of another timbrel or a nymphaeum

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.”