My poor attempt to follow Chris’s very interesting Venus poem with images centers on Artemis. Immediate reflection tells me I want this briefer, more elegant.
In the moon, in the night you bathe, palming pool water into streams upon your skin. It glistens like stars, traces constellations on your back-- a map of the impotent, failed suitors caught between shadows of your shoulders.The sheen of your silver hair wanes as you turn toward me. Cut close it shows more skin, more neck, the angles of your frame, the bulb of your pale breast draws me to the open where, naked, I quake in the midnight air, shaking like a hound before its master falsely, feebly held together like the water in your cupped hands I break upon the pounded shore.Diana Palace of Caserta
The pink I thought I saw blossom on your milky cheeks-- was it coyness or rage? Your eyes, black as a bear's, tear a path to the mouth of the creek bed show their black unto your silver bow, your endless quiver from which you slide a single shaft. Fingering it's notch you draw it back.Modesty, Metropolitan Museum of Art
You who give but won't receive, release the string, send the straight and stinging arrow into me. Its piercing cancels any chance to catch my breath; I moan, I twitch, I shudder, emptying for death.Diana of the Tower, Augustus Saint-Gaudens
Prone on my back in the understory, trees and night sky above, now all is still: obsessive lust, doomed desire, absurd attachment, burdened brotherhood all are falling free. I wait for my heart to beat, for my lungs to heave, for you but once to find, to stand over me.The Archer, Johann Philipp Ferdinand c1930
Forced to it, I must admit I am your enemy a predator of liberty, of celibacy; at last, at least your prey. Standing over me your short hair lets slip a drop of its potency, spattering warm on my dying lips, a liqueur of your triumph-- no bacchanalian fete with wine-soaked tresses, but quiet, wild, and solitary.Diana, Jean-Antoine Houdon c1790
Do you watch? Or do you merely pass? I strain to gasp, to say, to wish, Unmastered idol, virgin of self-mastery, beware, for others soon will come, beware, the banshee's ardent call, beware, the hermit's friend-lorn letter, beware, the promised rest, the earned calm, beware, and never let your hair grow long!
