Sleeping Bacchante

On Watching You Sleep After the Bacchanal
Sated satyr, I sit and watch soft breasts
rise and fall with your dreams’ rhythms, ponder
love’s mysteries in my wine haze, wander
my own wilderness spent, drunk, and undressed
from wild rides through vineyards . . . You were impressed
with—what?—you fell giggling to lie under
my lust’s burning, ripe and lusty, wonder
of youth [...]

Sestina on Love

Shadow Being
What manner of lover are you being?
You send no flowers, pen no poems, you
speak no gentle words in evening’s shadow
or under starry night. You paint no canvas,
carve no marble—how are you a lover
who never love? But let’s define this thing,
this abstraction called love, this sweetest thing
to artists; is it a state of being,
a state [...]

Naked, prance through Coventry

My Lady, Godiva
My Lady: Word came down through odd channels,
spewed from the rumor mills like an omen
of terrible aspect . . . Some speak of old sin,
others claim this and that. Through thin panels
I hear them in the public house—annals
sung by curs too low to beg your name, men
with less honor even than—Oh, but then
their [...]

Knight Errant

Knight and the Virgin Queen
Though Percival I am not, I swear life
and limb to your service, Oh Virgin Queen;
my valor and service to you for one
smile and your Queen’s blessing. Whatever strife
I face in your name, whatever unseen
fate may wait, I vow life, limb, moon, and sun
to serve your gentle will. I shall take wife
nor [...]

Bondage Love

These Bonds of Love
He’s the archetypical hero. She
always bound by chains only he can break.
It raises questions: Who bound her, what rake
or tyrant leaves a naked woman free
to run naked in chains? Why from the sea;
always an ocean journey, seaside jailbreak
as though one could find bound girls for the sake
of cruising any coast . . [...]

Dionysus Rising

Whisper, Sweet Muse, Your Song into My Soul
They tell me those halcyon days are gone,
that muses are but childish tales from long
ago centuries. They say that, along
with all the myths, the gods are dead, have gone
to give rise to science . . . They say no one
is home in the heavens, that we belong
in Nature [...]

Age & Beauty

Too Long I Left You Waiting
We met beside the well outside that town
down by the river; I, pale mockery
of a poet, you tall in flowing gown
and fine leather sandals. My lechery
is at least sincere . . . your beauty astounds
me even now, your sweet melancholy
plucks this harp that is my poet’s heart
and calls me lines [...]

Naked Echo

Echo—Echo Beside Still Waters
She thought him magnificent, thought him Love
incarnate; his beauty trapped her beside
that fell-fated glen . . . narcissus inside
himself heard her song as some new part of
himself—that’s just how he is—and her love
was more obsession, really, though she died
to justify it as more, song sung lust-dyed
to haunt all time. And yet, push [...]

Slaves to Passion

Why Buy?
Never really understood the allure
of owning another person; why want
a slave? Even for an hour? What impure
impulse to wish such power, wish to flaunt
one’s need for control by means of coin when
will alone won’t suffice? Coercion won’t
fulfill that wish for interdependence,
nor will all your money buy love—what whores
sell is nothing but release, liberation
from relationship [...]

Temptress

Meditation on Her Bust
Raised a Southern gentleman, I’m obliged
somewhat to euphemize these sentiments,
oh alabaster goddess. Rudiments
and archetypes of Love coil, and are pledged,
in those ivory hills (it might be alleged
yet that I am a scoundrel), torrents
of allure grace soft lips, curving laments
from mothers lost to sons astray and hedged
all ‘round with Biblical pitfalls, and yet
we [...]