PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

(after Andrew Marvell's poem,
'The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers';

to my Muse, in the words of Mallarme:
'M'introduire dans ton histoire')

i

Late Spring, a Saturday's bright dawn;
the high school's cares forgotten, gone;
the Lady wakes to earliness,
bathes and selects her finest dress---
modest, adorned with lace (long hem
a length no old maid can condemn);
and with it, hose---
the nylon reinforced around her toes.

ii.

Excited, with no time to lose,
she steps out---curvy, shoeless Muse.
Across the dawn-warmed, dew-dropped grass,
her pretty, sheer-sheathed feet now pass,
as if on purest air to glide.
(Such beauty cannot be denied.)
Then, past some shade,
she comes upon a small and sacred glade.

iii.

In that place, so far from the world,
much peace and joy have been unfurled.
To her, it is the sweet site of
her blooming, adolescent love.
Her shy smile glows with chaste allure:
her poet is awaiting her.
To start his bliss,
she gives him a delighted, lingering kiss.

iv.

Now, to inspire his poetry,
she frolics for him shoelessly.
Gently teasing, she pulls him near
those reinforcements, then the sheer.
Striking a most endearing pose,
she draws a leaf across those toes,
and then to each
arch and flexed sole, held just beyond his reach.

v.

Next, to an ancient, shallow pool,
half hid by thick wildflowers (that rule
the ground), she leads him: to display---
as she steps into it---the way
its ankle-deep, fresh water wets
her stockings. Now the poet forgets
even his name,
watching her innocently, without shame.

vi.

Let lurking perverts stifle crude
remarks; likewise, the attitude
of righteous hayseeds, snagged on sin,
on which they preach. Saved, born again,
baptized, Surely knows to direct
her poet's love to this prospect
that satisfies
them both without least moral compromise.

vii.

As she sits in the noon's bright sun,
her hose dry on her legs. That done,
she asks him for a slow caress
as foot-rub---that he might express
his pleasure. Heels, sole, arches, toes
draw lyric lines past words of prose.
Her stockinged feet,
thus offered, make his day---their love---complete.

viii.

Their moment, privileged and elect,
is my poetic retrospect.
The measured line and coupled rhyme
take me back to that place and time
(the strategy of allegory
to bring me tangent to her story).
The clockwork veers,
to bring me toward my Muse's teenaged years.

 
Starward
 
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