The Path

Now where?

The life of the writer!

Agility, especially in uncertainty. Move nimbly when required.

There is nowhere to settle, at least not for long. The path continues, and it must be traveled, step by step.

Resting. Missing. Mourning. Dancing over the edges.

Adrift

Out of the fertility of the ocean, sea tides within, rhythms following the moon's wake, I sought you.

My planet of fire.

You'd disappeared into steaming mist. I lost you in the clouds. Perhaps you'd transformed into the raptor flying overhead. Or the dark loam of the shore looming.

You were always only figments,
imagined.

Pink roses
falling in the wind.

What could be fired her desire, kept her enthralled. Only now she sees what is.

For love is beautiful and painful, this is its nature. "A great love carries within it a mourning for love." [Edmund Jacobs.]

The way the processes of love unite what is disparate, the longings and communions, and hold us to our wanton paths amidst the fluxes of the heart.

Venus
adrift...

Titles

Sometimes I have trouble with titles. The Red Flower was the only one I could ultimately use because those were the first three words of the poem (which I hope you get, how it was written I mean), and that's okay when you can't come up with anything else. The Red Flower seems to be part of another series, a 'Vishnu, The Preserver' series perhaps, who knows if a theme is developing. The Venus Poems are continuing to develop. Mostly I'm fine with the titles I choose. Though In the Throes of Love... really was a bit much, sort of 40s romance, or I thought, this morning Venus in Lament would I think be better, since she's left being Celestial Aphrodite and entered the realm of Pandemos, where there are no rules and it isn't altogether fun, but why give away the last line? Oh, it's so impossible, this naming of the words of love that poetry is...

The Red Flower

(I think this poem goes with what may be a "Vishnu" series, the first of which is Vishnu on Chinese New Year.)


The red flower spirals
or it's a fractal
folding.

His heart is a window
box with a red flower

Beating. Petals spiral in, or out,
Magritte-like.

A map in water, a warehouse, snowblue.
Lost pink dancing slippers,
a church in black and white,
a chorus singing carols.

Quarantine. Insolence. Defiance.
Burlap and cold steel.
Madness in prison.

I heard the message,
its jumbled sanity.

Fragments of patterns,
like this poem,
torn from the epic.

Worlds within worlds.

Bullets and blood, the heart floods.
Five billion dying in biological warfare.
What was that movie where he dreamed his death,
unable to save the world.

Saviour, the preserver.

We'll all be saved on a microchip,
says the prophetess.

In the Throes of Love...

If there is a ground,
it is a quantum of vibrating molecules.

Like walking on water during a storm at sea.

No guides in this emotional terrain,
it's new.

I don't know where I'm going or how to get there. Logic has failed; intuition, senseless.

Furies and lies and deceptions blow like crazed winds everywhere. Nothing can be trusted to be what it seems or purports to be. The stories you are told aren't the real ones. Secrets are everywhere. The underside is sleazy, riven with seething. And you wonder how you missed the way through, or if it ever was there. And when the revelations come, and they do, like light through the floods, you don't know how to survive them, and if you do, what direction you should be travelling in now.

Rudderless, without navigation.

How can you find ground when there is no ground?

What is continuous in the discontinuous?

What lasts in impermanence?

What is it in the wavering flame that doesn't go out? Even in the storm I travel though.

Perhaps on a scallop seashell, a Venus in lament.

She Who Came Forth

The Embrace. Their children couldn't emerge into the light. He was heaven and she was earth. Uranus and Gaia, his wife, who he loved and refused to separate from. Creation waited. The embrace was tight, intimate, sensual, blissful, deeply in each other, unending. Cronus, his son, time, cruel time, cut off his genitals and threw them into the sea. Heaven and Earth separated. Out of the foam, Aphrodite was born. Love.

Aphrodite, who she was to the Ancient Greeks, though she was older than that, and linked to Ishtar-Astarte, and probably brought to the Greek islands by Phoenician sailors, Aphrodite, who later became Venus to the Ancient Romans, is one of the world's oldest divinities.

She was born from an act that separated Heaven and Earth. An ancient divinity present at the beginning of time. She Who Came Forth at the birth of the world.

Or, this is Hesiod's version in his Theogony. Aphrodite represents pure and spiritual love. From her foamy birth the Three Graces received her and wrapped her in rich garments and decorated her with gold ornaments.

The Goddess of Love.

Aphrodite Urania, or Celestial Aphrodite.

The Venus Botticelli saw, painted, understood.

Oh, there was another one, Homer's in his Iliad. Venus Pandemos or Common Aphrodite. She was born from Zeus and the Titan Goddess, Dione. This Aphrodite was baser, lust-driven and associated with physical satisfaction...

Humanitas, the flowering

Venus - 'Humanitas,'
guiding force of the Renaissance
precious fantastic spirit
which transformed Western
civilization

Allegory of Spring

Spirit of the Renaissance

Out of the Dark Ages
with the rediscovery
of classical antiquity

Herald of the golden age
flowering of arts and sciences
under her tuteledge,
the great goddess
in her many
guises


What if Venus bucked
her symbolism as
spiritual value and
swung her scallop
shell around and
dove into
deep seas,
an intensity
of dark
passion?