The Green Wire Shelf

It's a rickety wire corner piece with soldered leaves trailing in green over which I hung a couple of strands of small white festive lights. It fits in the tiny corner of the tiny room. The bottom shelf has a few scattered printed poems that I read into his voicemail, not that he should be the only one to receive them, and you should know that, and manuals for the Tivoli stereo and radio and the Bang & Olufson headphones; the middle shelf holds a refurbished black plug-in Northern Telecom phone with good unfuzzy sound, real retro; the top shelf, a small stack of articles and art books on Botticelli.

When I meditate I unplug the lights, and after lie down and close my eyes and let the silence take me deeper, when I come up from the depths I roll over and place the jack of the lights into the plug on the middle shelf, the one with the retro phone.

Oh, the books have fallen a few times. I know I should have fixed the wobbly wire garden corner shelf to the wall but I didn't have a large picture hook and the store I went to didn't have that size.

Of course it happened. The books tumbled and rolled and fell onto my head in the dark while I was trying to attach the plugs for the small trellis of lights.

I was stabbed by the hardcover corner of my favourite one, the prints are so lush, and I stare at them in the evenings wondering how the Renaissance master painted them.

I have a bruise on my right cheek bone. It's pale grey, and slightly sore. I cover it in a little tinted moisturizer.

My Botticelli bruise.

frozen seas
currents
hot and cold
intermixing
where Venus
wrapped in shawls
of frost
treachery of winds
is this cold
reception
poetry
in the world?

a la scallope

innocent and lyrically sensuous, fragile, beauty,
powerful goddess and untouched maiden, a blossom

of love

figure of spiritual ecstasy

incarnation of love under a paintbrush, in a vision, a feeling, expansive,
a Botticelli pink rose, Venus in her purity, born from the seafoam, coming into
being, music to ears that hear the seawinds bearing her
towards us

Ocean of Ice

Ice floes, sharp, jagged icicles. Hidden, floating icebergs. Tearing, sinking, drowning. We struggle amid snow squalls and tears of fire burn our cheeks. It's a dance of avoidance in the avalanche of the Arctic waters. Do not freeze, or turn to ice.

Ice moves quickly, unpredictably, in response to ocean currents and wind. Ice, like tectonic plates. Frozen earthquakes and ice mountains, ridges and blocky ice rubble. O be wary, what impales the heart, tides of ice.

Ice floes surge and spin, ice moves in packs, networks of cracks and patches of open water, pushing broken ice, loose chunks of ice, and ice jams. Icebreaking.

But the currents are intermixed in this strange painting of love, surging warmth and rigid cold. Where deceptions occur: what looks solid, isn't. And then the ice so thin it's a mirror down into the depths.

Venus comes aloft on her scallop seashell amidst the ice floes; the Zephyr winds are cold and northerly. The Horae await with a cloak embossed with delicately beautiful ice flowers, as fragile as morning frost. Where is the warmth? The sea is awash with cold and hot waters, whitecaps of ice or steam. Which currents are to be trusted?

Sun-washed Blossoms

Ishtar's high priestess, Inanna, queen of heaven and earth, of the rising and setting star in the East, Venus, sexual mystery of the darkness, not the sun-stroked beauty of Botticelli's.

Unclothed, unashamed but virginal, an untouched goddess of love blown in by waves whose whitecaps are like flocks of flying white birds. Botticell's Venus not the sensual 'come-hither' of Inanna and her Shepherd-King, Dumuzi. Or she of the Song of Songs.

Botticelli's Venus is the Virgin in a pagan landscape of delight in the beauty of the world. Fragile becoming on the wind-washed shores of our being. Her beauty not lustful but ethereal; the innocence of unblemmished spirituality.

Only, Botticelli, man who remained like a monk, single, dedicated to art, and art alone, your gorgeous muse causes all of Nature to bloom in your paintings where it bursts out of your canvases, the Birth of Venus and the Primavera.

Where is the sultry goddess of the dark gleaming gold temple of love?

Valentines Day

Those of you who have been reading my latest series of poems will understand the humour in this image, I say laughing. You never know where she will appear! Happy Valentines!

Temple of Love

Venus, star in the night. Love in the darkness. Your breath. Ecstasies of the body, erotic touch. This temple, its sacred creativities.

O, the goddess of love awaits, inviting. Sighing, and moans. The gleam of the god of war, his helmet golden red in the night.

When Anteros - god of requited love, "love returned," and the avenger of scorned love - came, wings beating like heartbeats, you knew me. For the first time. Anteros, brother of Eros, god of lust, love, erotic union.

Fire gleams in your eyes, volcanic. You didn't see me before though you had known me a long time. I was hidden in your life.

I'm tired of restrictions. Let's change what we have meant to each other. Like angels lying in a bouffant of chocolate and roses. The convergences on the public holy day of love, Valentine's.

Great art presents itself as presence in the world, alive, shimmering.

What the heart holds, for it prefers secrecy.