Dionysian Dancer

A barbaric insult to your sacred sovereignty was his summons

Beauty, as Kant reminds us, is a source of disinterested pleasure

Can I possibly do justice to the extent of the pleasure your brute being bestows upon me?

Dionysus, born from the thigh of Zeus, doyen of drunkenness, expert in ecstasy

Evoked you from the opaque ocean of oblivion

For the sake of this fumbler with pigments and brushes?

Grotesque were his rudeness and his presumption!

How did he dare to dabble in the domain of demons and deities?

In cases like this, one wonders if the phrase “great man” is an oxymoron

Just look at the elegant arabesques of your horns

Knowledge of the sort you must possess is rare and precious as sapphires

Loping through grove and glade, kissed by moonlight and susurrating with secrets

Murmuring a language older than any human ear

Never uncertain of purpose or aim, for a god made you for dancing

Over all of this, he looked with ambitious and covetous eyes

Painter, sculptor, thief of mysteries whose nature he could only guess at

Questing not after understanding, but glory—by what borrowed, eldritch charm did he call you?

Reticent, even bashful is your countenance; how filthy was the floor your downcast eyes touched?

Stupid hubris was the circle he caught you in, to be his object

Tell me that Paris was not a haughty harlot with hellish halitosis when he tore you from the forest

Under his gaze were you diminished, enslaved, commodified

Vile as all of this was, please accept that your sad, stubborn majesty remains

Whoever gazes at this rendering of your radical, regal difference will taste its primordial pungency

Xenophiles will outnumber the stars as eyes trace your taught copper curls

You show that what is strange is what is beautiful

Zealots of Bacchus must have brought Euripides to watch you dance his tragedy into being