Metamorphoses
If you want to see
transformation, look
how Bernini turned
marble into flesh,
how a travertine slab becomes
two opposing
figures posing.
Watch the stone’s spiraling shape
shift to an encircling shroud.
Witness how Hades’ hand holds
the thigh and impresses
itself just so,
how the opposite fingers insinuate themselves
into the fleshy cleft of a twisting torso
as she turns away,
and how the nape folds
back to the top of the shoulder
when she sends a cry up.
This single moment, the ultimate
corporeal act, bound
by marble to the mundane.
Notice how the work
of art is a violation
masterpiece.
How her hair locks into a cumulating nimbus,
forever storming.
How the lecherous seethes through the teeth,
meat-eating smile.
How one side of his eye leers
upward against her negating hand,
and that stupid stupid look
on his face,
like a sadistic child
that always gets what he wants,
is always getting what he wants,
so he takes it, is always taking it.
This single moment.
This one single instant:
One scene, obscene.
We know how the story ends,
but with no end ever ending
we can imagine any ending.
What if Persephone
escapes, plunging
the world into eternal
spring, springing the world into eternal
summer.
What if Cerberus,
the patient Hades hound,
develops suddenly
a taste for blood and seeks
it from his master’s bloody,
blood-filled dog.
What if Artemis, friend
of Persephone, arrives
to hunt Hades down
and, in traditional Greek
style, sets right the lunatic
machinery
and he is sent down
to dwell in a cell
of his own making,
guarded by the same dog
that, with all its many eyes,
calmly witnessed the crime.
Wrote this one while in the Borghese Gallery looking at Bernini's Pluto and Proserpina.
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