PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

[after Constantine Cavafy's poem, "Sculptor Of Tyana,"

and Sylvia Path's poem, "Colossus"]

Imaging the design of your form and contours;

composing you out of the rawest materials;

presenting you to the Stratonikians during festivities:

these were not mere linear events, but three distinct

phases of the star that lit my soul's too empty sky.

Not even the haters, the prudes, and the prejudiced

have been able to prevent your erection in the

flowered meadows, just beyond Stratonikia, the

fields of Hyacinth and Calumus, where the lavender

flowers eagerly release their nectar at any probing tongue.

Although your body's beauty is homogenous, the

soul that your face expresses is fluid---

Eros, Ganymede, Narcissus, Hylas, Patroclus prior to the War---

so I name you Mousa Paidike, at the suggestion of

Straton the Poet, who bears the city in his name.

Your limbs I have fashioned to the delicacy of an

adolescent boy's; your love-gladdened smile still bears an

awareness of the hatreds that infect some brutal,

brawney and braindeadened thugs whose bravery is

only emboldened after a tankard of rancid brew.

Not for me, the boast of innovating:

moving parts beneath your pectorals bring a firming;

small pumps, water driven and driving water, raise

that gnomon-like device through which the finest

harvested honey flows at even the least of effort.

I was the awkward and clumsy kid, who could not

run very fast---in footraces, or from beatings.  A little too

chubby around the edges, a little too

myopic in the directed gaze; a little too

pipsqueak in the voice, afflicted with stammer and stutter:

my ugliness (I no longer eschew the term or the

concept it conveys) was vouchsafed---given---blessed with---the

vision of beauty from which you emerged;

you who did not disdain nor detest my appearance;

you who surged beneath the artistry of my hands and fingers.

Now as the sun departs from the West with its pinkening flourish, and

stars arise in the East to constellate the night sky's unflawed sable:

I put my very mouth upon you to impart the pleasures that both of

us deserve; my kisses all over you, my lips' caresses, my tongue's

language mounting the notch of that little bridle, there to receive the sweetness.

Starward