Imagining at Wellfleet
Venus herself, enshelled,
Mother-naked floating
Over Massachusetts Bay
(Why? To redeem the Age?)
And stepping lightly across
The beach like a lush maenad,
Or Isadora being Greek,
To offer us Such Love
One must face the real, the water-winged
Not winged-over-water creatures.
Emphatically not here
Venus A. Botticelli,
And maybe she was never,
Not here or anywhere.
But we are real, adepts
Of love in a summer season,
Mocking the talk of love
(Yet each with his hot dream)
Laymen who’d rock a goddess
Gently, sun-goggled oglers
Burning, burning, on the burning sand.
And Venus? Oh no, not here.
She was another country
And besides
Turn earthward!
Visions of perfect love
Start from the look toward heaven,
The look through the glare, hot
And unguarded—the look at the sun,
That god who pities us not.
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