Actaeon's Ruins
Actaeon’s ruins
(A pagan spiritual translated into the English)
Do not go with the boy with the beaver teeth.
Do not go into that goodnight
Do not go into the suburbs of social good graces
of creeping affluence where your baby fat is ever young.
Come, slip the noose so satiny soft, so thrilling about your neck.
Come, Diana, from the kitchen of your maidens’ recipe.
Come back to the hunt, back to the wilds. Come back
to the poetry of miracles where your heart pounds out of control.
Lose yourself in the chase … wherever it may lead, caution be damned.
Through the mud and lashing grasses there is a fount sublime and sustaining,
deep as your soul is pure. It is there that I see you and catch my breath.
Catch the first breath of the first man that very first day.
Do not go with the boy with the beaver teeth.
I long for your scent to not fade away.
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