Primavera
She stands serene,
The goddess,
In the sacred fertile grove,
Beatific,
Blessing,
Beckoning.
She stands apart,
The goddess,
While all around her is
Blowing,
Blooming,
Becoming.
She stands demure,
The goddess,
Bridal, at the hub of all
Lust,
Love,
Life.
She stands fertile,
The goddess,
Radiating from her
All yearning,
All longing,
All desire.
The Weekly Avocet, #75, May 21, 2014
Three Paintings of the Birth of Venus
Botticelli
Newly formed from foam
off the Cytherian coast,
she is all line and pale color,
passionless,
pure,
virginal,
borne on tiny waves
weightless
on a cockle shell.
Pomona rushes
a robe of flowers,
its fertile restless folds
eager to caress
the perfect body.
But the robe, fluttering,
will always wait
in this suspended moment,
celebrating innocence
before the birth of lust or love,
when the world will burst in bloom.
Boucher
They wash ashore like bodies from a wreck at sea,
Venus, mermen, mermaids, sea nymphs, all aboard
a great gray gasping rubber raft of dolphins, like
a bathtub toy, splashed by gods against the shore.
Venus rides a salon couch of satin waves.
Triumphant blasts of conch and banners rising high
held aloft by putti tell the world that now
love’s arrived. Let there be joy among all men
for doll-faced, youthful, rosy, soft and supple skin.
The distant turbulent black-clouded stormy sky,
a hint of Saturn’s bloody rage that gave her birth,
is past, a distant myth, let’s think no more of that,
and let’s not loiter long by dark forbidding cliffs.
Wait a bit, we’ve seen this all before.
Here’s a wink and nod to old Poussin,
whose sober canvas seems a lecture
on religion of the ancients and their art,
formal, stiff and so old-fashioned.
Let’s party! Love is here to stay, get it on
wherever Venus waits, in salon, park, palais,
woods, chateau, hôtel, street or dark allée.
Redon
Splashes,
but only of color.
A hint of tiny shells
suggest a shore
where the goddess
in her divine shell,
sleeping
in shimmering
mother-of-pearl,
dreams of waking.
The above three poems appeared in Mystic Blue Review, Spring, 2018
Constellations
Coyotes
Sun and Moon
En la Selva
Cocina Mexicana
Brother Francis
In the High Desert
A New Mexican Poet 