Aphrodite and Ares

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-a sure thing.

Yet how elusive the mediterranean

Light on the limits of our imagining.

Our human

Thought and its vagaries attend forever the birth

Of Aphrodite. From the tumultuous blue,

Out of these waters at an early dawn

Earth

Received her, lusting with spring, and knew

Only the pleasure of the delighted lawn.

Signs might have cried: Keep off.-but the happy heart

Conceded the beachhead. We were insatiably lured,

And later, patched up by religion and art for art,

: Falteringly inured

Somehow to manage again, except for the one

Haunted chamber opposing the regular commerce.

We are affected, incurably saddened and mad.

What's done

Must be endured, no matter how you coerce

Past thunder's shanty her smile in a tattered ad.

She won't be mocked. The stunt once pulled has blunted

Only the agent. What lives in a farmer's glance

Or a child's as they look, the growth of wonder granted

Is in advance |

Of salesmanship. Imponderable accounts

Are started,-a full task force of the feature

Enchantment has put ashore. Responsibility

Mounts

Like water. The insurmountable creature

Dawn in her eyes is rising from the sea.

And we, between Botticelli and Keats' Ode

On a Grecian Urn, must suffer the punishments

Of standards illicit as Helen which will goad

Men and events

Into ulterior compulsion. The Trojan war,

Too, had its profiteers, and neither am I

Now stable. The surface trembles on which I write.

We are

Convulsed with righteous insincerity

Each stands unaided in a failing light.

O Aphrodite, striking at the core

Of injudicious loving, spoil our show.

What little town by river or seashore

Will grow

A radioactive vapor like Hephaistos'

Slow lifting smoke against an empty sky?

Deflect, we pray, the photogenic plane.

Once

Monstrous, virulent in agony

Past its satiric tilt, despair is vain.