MEDIAL EROS: A Cautionary Tale

The Marriage of Cupid & Psyche, Pompeo Batoni, 1756
image in public domain see wiki

BETWEEN SEA AND WINGS

How my psyche has sort its see’d
where the god had intercourse with her.
                       ***

How an intervention like this
every psyche will have had to perform

unsowingly ―
a kind of knowing

And the god
displays this ― twoness

―this
psychic reality wing-like
                  ***

Aphrodite works in the myth
to keep Eros and Psyche apart

sending the soul to death
―yes, to death and where

what death wants with soul
leads every psyche alone into the alone.

Waiting there is a gift
beautifully boxed

(makes me think, “pandoran”) psyche
opens it and her “self” anoints.

Some say the divine Miss A
works that way

to keep Psyche & Eros apart
but, I don’t know.
                  ***

There’s an old story about
the wings Aphrodite gives Eros

she had given first to her
playmate in the sea see

hoping to coax “him” to come
to celestial Oulympos[i]

where to she
withdrew

when Nerites refused, she left
and took those sea-wings, too.

The myth says she gives
those wings to Eros

And the god
displays this ― twoness

―this
psychic reality wing-like

I think that is
what Aphrodite wanted

for her playmate psyche
sorting its’own see’d

she wanted to guide
Psyche to where in her psyche

this fluid reality comes
together like sea-wings

neither on earth
nor in heaven



©2016 Tutelary Eros & Psyche stephaniepope mythopoetry.com

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[i] World Time.  Olympos or Oulympos as the name is also spelt was probably identified with Kronos (Time), the father of Zeus, and plays a similar role. In a Greek description of the Phoenician cosmogony by the writer Mochos, a primeval god named Oulomos (World-Time) (cf. the name Oulympos) is born to Aither (the Light of Heaven).