The Pike
Essence is beauty. Motion says essence
Is beauty, but it lives in stasis too
In Keats’ ode. In static incandescense,
As in painfully imagined blue
Sky higher than lowing sacrifice,
The heifer in her fatal garlands lives
Eternally. Yet beauty lives in ice
That breaks off, floats from glacier, and gives
Itself to long delayed and melting death,
An iceberg vast and ancient far past mind.
Beauty as young and dead as Ashtoreth
Is temporary as the arrowed hind.
00Beauty is as old and arch as Cretan
0000Gods—and swans whose cygnets have been eaten.