From a Platonist's Sojourn in America's Aroostook County

 

The mind is manners,

and manners are the mind,

and this is the jingle

that clinks and chimes—

 

But what of the old sly hag

who ran with a robbers' band

and spun, to pass the night,

a tale from the Golden Ass

 

for a poor kidnapped lass?

It takes a god, a monster

stunning in disguise,

a snake hid in the dark,

 

and a woman's mortal soul,

"wonderfully merged,"

to make a Voluptas—

a wonderchild of want.

 

Is this why ladies "with a class"

would order or invent a shaggy faun—

to strip down qualms and hang

their morals out to dry

for the hour that lets them act?

 

"Oh, Eros," having leafed

through Auden's Penguin Reader,

a studious girl might sigh,

"he's surely the one who brought

 

a sense of reflection into my life.

Nonne amor caput rerum omnium est?

May Cupid never perish,

so I'll always find him by!"

 

So hearing this, I listen

and start to suspect why,

in fauns and their tails,

they found a needed tonic—

 

for, as they say, "neither

should we fear love

nor take such gifts for granted."

But only those who read extra

 

could cite Socrates—I mean,

that Banquet woman, Diotima:

"Do not then insist that what is not fair

is of necessity foul,

 

or what is not good evil;

or infer that because love is not fair

and good he is therefore foul and evil;

for he is in a mean between them" (Plato 201d–204c).

 

And just as fast, one hand

behind their backs, the students

of Maine's fields and woods

would gladly wrap it up:

 

"Love is never white or black!

Still, 'nothing can be had

without a price' (Epictetus):

with brutes we pay for mores,

 

with devils, in lips of vows.

And though morals are a must,

fauns—the devils—are more fun,

even if characters wane

 

like candles in the wind

when all's a thing of lust.

But wouldn't Plato too

summon a bit of touch

 

'with a sense of distance'?"