SWEET SIXTEEN: EROS (LIFE ENERGY) IN 2016

EROS and Psyche

EROS ARROWS I BEHELD AND THEN
      I beheld your features with my soul -Ovid, Heroides, 16-18

Up against a thin wall, the skin split
a skin hard in shell and worn subterranean
a pressed skin too terribly hard, a tight dress
in dressed-down flesh, remote and
recessed, a peri-flesh in paradise.

Once a home till wings are clipped
once a world, unbottled, bared

she still lives the place, broad-breasted
and in her being (in really being nowhere)
as if sex, like flesh, undressed
as if sex, like paint, were flesh
the first of the first lived
like the best in us, the worst and slid

the deep fissure in a way of being
out of chaos slide.

First came the chasm and then beauty
broad-breasted, ourea snowy
something dark and remote in recess
a great release, living force and passion
wet and willed to no purpose wingéd flew
and EROS, too, dissolver of flesh, withdrew.


Zero in EROS
disturb beyond reason
something living cupped like wet silver
living underneath
out of reach and rhyme, something
a little out of time
in composition, sex
so sublime the shapeless killing
in it, kills with love; what kills
splitting arms and legs a-part
a deep fissure, a way of being (submerged).

How it loosens! And, oh, how,
when nothing sees something and wonders
in draperies gilded red with eyes
the treasure lives low the vowel
in genos and the gene.

It brings to order its own order
a chaos genet, a living softness in dressed up flesh―down inside;
the best in us, the worst
painfully aware of the illness we are

the roundness of it
worn like a shell.


©2015 Zero In by stephanie pope
republished courtesy of  mythopoetry.com

©2006 Zero In stephaniepope mythopoetry, first publication 

notes

1.  "I beheld your features with my soul."  for more of this passage see  [27] http://www.theoi.com/Text/OvidHeroides4.html 

2. Full the full text of Ovid Heroides see the above link.

MONDAY POETRY

APHRODITE OF THE SEA

"Lightly she stepped on shore, and under the gentle pressure of her delicate foot the dry and rigid sand became transformed into a verdant meadow, where every varied shade of colour and every sweet odour charmed the senses. "

       ~ A WORLD OF MYTHS         http://www.aworldofmyths.com/Greek_Gods/Aphrodite.html

shell lacked no beauty where  
your own pink footprint stepped
in one right out of you sky blue that fled

my wide remembering not still 
in tide & sweep & leap ashore; 
it is no wonder I am worn with what you wore 

& now I’m thinking 
intimacy a little word
a threnody in as to me

I’m thinking as is intimacy’s shell 
a field of beauty rising 
from the oysters under sea
 ..........................

in pieces swimming swell ashore
flow & drop, rise & plop intimacy here 
in wave and leaving

leaving here & sunken 
sunlit, slivered, drenched & 
spurting exalted genitus skyblue & pink 

in me each time although in each time through
dismembered by the days 
now nowhere, too

how intimate where you withdrew
& with her other name
shell threw this empty black

a gray green living corpse
my tatters even now
though transient & wounded, too the round

where matter left the gray green
stamped in me still damp
imprinting how

& how you shatter in & matter in
the gray green foam
whitely living

word for word
as-intricately me
the oysters under sea

shell lacked no beauty where
your own pink footprint stepped
in one right out of you sky blue that fled

I'm thinking as succinctly she
intimate and empty swelled
within a field of beauty shelled