Venus Anadyomene
Blood and foam battle,
intermingle, intermix,
roll together, sea-compounded:
wave, god, death.
Beauty blooms on seacrest,
ascends from byssal womb,
natal-naked glory
on fierce and naked tide:
Rises Dione over wave,
foam-skinned, living blush,
golden-haired, guiltless-white
upon a blood-red sea.
Parmenides' Vision
Rapt, thrown upward, undone,
Ecstatic sight seeking vital clue,
I journeyed on a well-known path.
She came:
Great gold-winged goddess, chariot-driving,
More splendid than any Cyprian glory
On sands manifested to a mortal man.
She came,
Speaking to my dreaming ears:
Two are the ways before you;
One is true, one appears.
Both are gated, and above the first
God-like message shines forth
Like the words above the Delphic road,
Holy:
What is, is, and is not what is not.
Upon that path journey, said she,
The way of truth and not of seeming;
What seems will pass, the real remains;
Wisdom's lover finds relief
In what is.
Then was that fleeting, swift-footed, golden goddess
Gone, and I amazed.
In All the World Are None for Me
In all the world are none for me.
Lonely whispers from the sea
like shadows slink out on the sly
beyond the corner of my eye:
words cannot capture weary heart,
nor force, nor faith, nor artless art,
and always mocking almost-mights
haunt the dark and lonely nights,
long-broken idols made of sand
that whisper of the promised land,
gnat-like nothings made of air,
pithless deserts, dry and bare,
and one small impulse deep inside,
stubborn in its inborn pride,
to seek, to quest and never stay,
till love is found, or judgment day.
