Work Text:
Venus Wept
Were we to live as Romans
I would be the sculptor,
you the model—
who drapes his sinful limbs
in repose,
a body from which
I’d carve
an image of Adonis—
beauty incarnate,
born from a tree—
a man who lives without
his mother’s touch.
Your arms
are the branches
of your mother’s
love
lost.
We would meet
in carriages
under darkness,
our voices strangled
into silence,
our bodies writhing,
a battle to win—
and white horses
would carry us
anywhere;
laughter hidden by
the crunch of gravel
under steady wheels—
bidding goodnight
with the slipping
of hands carved by marble
over pockmarked cheeks.
The next morning,
I would arrive
to Alexandria
to find its streets
ravaged, its philosopher
murdered—
an empty metropolis
for an empty man
whose Adonis lay still
on the forest floor.
And I, Venus,
would weep
upon the pillow
where your head should rest
in a foreign hotel room;
our bodies parted
as though in death
your cooling corpse
the trophy of boars—
a map of the places
I have touched you
and lost.