“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.
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