| | Oceanic - Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems
Veils to clothe Botticelli's Venus with
A poem arises catching the energy, imparting meaning, hesitant, faltering for words, images, rhythms.
My love for you.
Slowly, through endless revisions,
shaping this love.
Disparate layers emerge, an undercurrent infiltered with strands, approaches, understandings, memories, hopes, desires,
the way the sensual mind composes.
We create ourselves through each other. It's more complete,
who I am with you.
Not a version of reality but a veil of being,
the poem of love that is
a transparent garment we clothe ourselves with,
our metaphors and concepts of a world
which resists
our gaze.
Writing is a deeply
meditative act.
A language of love.
A listening.
Oceanic
If I knew how. The swirl-over. In the bank's marble concourse, the ocean wraps you in its currents. We are never far from sea-salt, the briny wind, even inland.
The gentle breezes, long before Sandro, before she came gliding on the fan-shaped scallop sea-shell under his paintbrush.
Before we clothed her with poetry.
The birth of love in the world.
Divine Message of Beauty in the World
I write on vellum with sea-scalloped edges.
Birth blueness is everywhere, that particular nascent colour.
You bring the simplicity of writing with you.
While I wear a cloak of flowers, a shower of roses, lyrical, fragile becoming, beauty, this flowing cape of words
That the goddesses of the seasons have woven for us.
____________________
Botticelli's Birth of Venus hangs in the Uffizi, in Florence. It was painted in 1485.
birth of beauty
times of decrease, recession, turmoil, depression, upheaval, war, loss and degradation, fear and grief, the unpardonable, what can't be retracted, the birth of love borne by beauty on the waves of the sea
Savonarola's body burnt in the Piazza della Signoria, it is 1498, he who convinced you to renounce the sensual pleasure of beauty - The Mystical Nativity painted in 1500 so different to when
you and Leonardo da Vinci, a friend who you studied with in Verrocchio's workshop in the 1470s
those angelic visions
art historians speak of spiritual tautness in your work, of the grace of line and that your figures are holy heiroglyphics
she appeared under your delicate sable brushes in 1492 and disappeared for centuries until the Pre-Raphaelites resurrected her and now she is a definer of feminine beauty in the modern world
with my curls, when I was a young woman, people used to compare me to 'Botticell's Venus'; I, too, have borne her...
rising from the sea
the rush of waves in my ears
listening to you
beauty, fragile, on the lip of, edges, knowing loss's inevitability, a flower blossoms, fragrant perfume and soft vivid colour of petal drifting away, it can't remain, you knew, Sandro, and
yet, she is, borne by the Zephyr on the scallop-shell and wrapped in veils of flowers by the Horae
washes of colour, seaspray of roses,
translucent robes
poetry we weave ourselves with
_________________
©Brenda Clews, Toronto, February 2008 |
