PARTISAN REVIEW
Since Lust for Love has mothered such a passion
She swears that she would die
A million times for him, and does; grafts
In
his
name her boundaries over
The earth. Battlements rise, warfare is proclaimed
In urban gutterals, and on
What little
is
left still she cuts the gardens that she says
Are holy: hedges trained
To slash the unwary, shaven lawns, a patch
Of flowers piping in her courtship
Language, and standing pools that mock eternity.
Then, drunken with success, she stands
The infant God there and cries "This
is
your Love":
And he, complacently:
"I frighten the birds with my baldness and obvious delight
In remaining completely my own
Rigid master. Daubed with the blood of worship,
A grim scarlet image,
Scythe in my right hand, member in my left, wreathed
With roses, deathless, amazingly
Hideous I stand, unfazed by laughter, chiding
Or folly, whom Phidias did not polish
Nor Scopas carve, but the will of a rustic shaped
Of a fig tree: Priapus Lignum,
The son of lovely malignant gracious Venus,
Weal and punisher of the soul,
And reeling Bacchus, contriver of the brain's unsated
Loves. But mine alone
Are the shouts given dancing and running,
I
o
Mutunus, Io Trip-hallus;
-
And I, the
and
so lively in man-and-wife,
Am
guardian of reins and gardens
Against rapacious hands." Is this our pride,
Our blessing and our gift? Could then
My hands throttle that croak and kill
him
once
For all, how soon in glory
They would: and she may tremble too recalling
The death of Semele, tremble
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