Headless Statues as Inspiration
Poets like to write & talk about Apollo’s body.
Can you expect a marble torso
headless and sublime to show up
in the smooth lines of two poets
separated by decades? Did not both Rilke
& Doty delve into Apollo
eager & sensuous as you like?
This is the edifice
of words, added to, subtracted
repeated in different ways
to tell us decapitation can indeed
be beautiful, headless stone
less of a problem than
human inspiration.
Perhaps in the admiration of
the male form it helps to be gay.
We will continue to polish bodies
with words & build & extend together
passed down in a lineage —
a seed, an idea, a theme
one branch intricately entwined
with another. I lean on the past
to know I belong & will not fly
off into outer space like a body
without weight, a body not made
of wax or glinting stone.
Copyright Simon Heathcote
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