Beauty, we know your story:
Time’s violent scythe
Brought you into the world
On a spray of jism (pronounced: sea-foam).
Would it be indelicate to inquire
Why this strange origin of Beauty
This dependency on horror?
Honoré de Balzac said of every great fortune, it begins with a crime.
Balzac was no great beauty.
True: in Rodin’s hands he had an air about him.
No offense, Daughter of Sky
As you emerge, nymphs trailing, from the Sea
Newborn full-length pristine stretched naked over wanton canvas in every artist’s loft
Impress your womanly form into the stony cold
Of marble blocks & my own dreams
& yet still pure although
Flecked with those small blood-speckled bits of that truly ginormous
Balzac (& I’m talking huge)
That swung through the air
In the invisible night
And landed in your Botticelli.
Copyright © 2019 by Cash Myron Toklas.
