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APHRODITES
The Louvre Antiquities: marble floors and walls, copies of lost bronzes, Aphrodites, anonymous or by Praxiteles once or many times removed, preside with their calm sexualities flagrant and serene. And the public faces of the Japanese women who cluster around the Aphrodites are masks we know from paintings, woodcuts - small, red, deeply cut mouths tightly poised, and downcast eyes, until, responding to a gesture or a word their faces open with complex smiles, knowing, eager to please as they rush to companions saying one thing with their eyes, another with the set of their mouths, laughing, ironic, aware. And the passionate curves of breast, buttock, thigh, are here calmed by marble and we call them gods to keep them distant so we can find some pleasure, some delight, some consolation, in our defections from their perfect form like the irregular features and alert, intelligent air of the woman needing to cross a wide, dangerous street who might also consider you with that look that hovers between confusion and a breathless, calculating urgency.