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Saturday 16 July 2011

In a Military Encampment


.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/Portrait_Seleucid_Prince_Massimo.jpg

Portrait related to the so-called Seleucid Prince. Marble, Roman copy of the 1st century AD after a Hellenistic original. From the Via Barberini, Rome: photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen, September 2009 (National Museum of Rome)




The heroes. They sit upon their stones with their weapons disengaged and converse softly
among themselves, murmuring the names of the legendary coveted trophy women, none daring risk
the vulnerable admission of a crucial and crippling nescience when it comes to these things.

Who is she? This Helen? This Sonia, or Sophia -- this prize? With her breasts of white gold that yet come alive, glistening in the dark not with the reflected firelight
of this desert encampment alone, but, in the tiny beads of sweat, in each of which is contained the further countless mirrored universes
of her eternally unreadable smile, with the obscure illumination of unimaginable remote fertile welcoming mystery haciendas?





http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Helen_Menelaus_Louvre_G424.jpg

Menelaus intends to strike Helen; struck by her beauty, he drops his sword. A flying Eros and Aphrodite (on the left) watch the scene. Detail of an Attic red-figure krater by Menelaus Painter ca. 450–440 BC, found in Gnathia (now Egnazia, Italy): image by Jastrow, 2006 (Department of Greek, Roman and Etruscan Antiquities, Musée du Louvre)

2 comments:

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Tom,

"Who is she? This Helen? This Sonia, or Sophia -- . . ."

7.16

grey whiteness of fog against invisible
ridge, song sparrow calling sweet sweet
in foreground, sound of wave in channel

picture something, position
“measurement of space”

man-made, pigmented surface,
vision of what is not

blue line of sky in clouds above point,
cormorant flapping across toward ridge

Ed Baker said...

AW< MAN!

so I am Knee deep (at least) into my newest .... long-poem AND was just looking into a name for "her"

so
between Plato AND Holderlin and a German 1920-something film that I just saw

I GOT it ! "Her" pinned down..

Plato's concubine : Diotima (who teaches "the philosophy of love" ? DIOTIMA!

Love being EROS being the son of "resource & need"

(or as Plato and Holderlin, et al 'have it" as I (continuously "use 'it/her'"
; an incredible
want desire is !
-and the Letters that follow!

these "goddesses" that Plato wrote about WERE REAL PEOPLE!
&

after first-time-sex with a Goddess everything that follows is literature: no bout a doubt it !

now to find my copy of Hyperion it s a paper-back with a black-ish cover...

thanks... this-all that you are doing has "Goosed" me...