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 [...]

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 [...]

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 . . [...]

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 [...]

Drowned in Beauty

I Almost Drowned
Spring, and the water lilies were in bloom,
so I took my Grecian urn down pondside
to fill with water for my hyacinths
and Labradors. What a delight to find
seven maids swimming naked and brazen
in spring’s mad equinox. And yet . . . oh pale-
fleshed goddesses, how can mortal choose one
beauty’s epitome from others? I
could not! [...]

Desert Nude

Wandering in the Wilderness . . .
It was a boyhood fantasy, coming
across a bare-breasted beauty in some
deserted place where she might rely on me
to rescue her, and her all willing
to reward my capable action with
tenderness and something undefined . . .
 
But now a man, I find myself here
in this deserted place, with this bare-
breasted young [...]

Wild

 
My Wild Love
Must have been the wine . . . can’t seem to recall
how I found you there, lying naked on
a spread out leopard skin, or at least
something patterned that way. Oh, and that
convenient golden sash. But mostly
I recall the haunting challenge of boredom
in bedroom eyes, at once sad and longing.
The pout of your [...]

Psalm to Bathsheba

Song for Bathsheba
Bathing as an angel, you, my naked
beauty! From first I saw you airing dry,
I knew my heart gone, saw cupid take it
 
oh brutal arrow! slayer of three, make it
right to wrongly act! Oh, but tell me why,
bathing angel, you stood outside naked
 
for me to see . . . my heart now yours, rake [...]