Gods were watching who’d win a game of chess,
in a peaceful Parisian scene below
where sunlight weft its way through plane trees
pruned to perfect a harmonious light.
an impressionist scene they both thought to say,
watching through windowpanes against their bed
which slipped and slid losing its bedspread,
as they enacted their improvised one-act play.
Sunlight slotted by slanted wood blinds,
shadows painted on a mottled white wall,
hands moving pieces driven by minds,
that probed that parried chess pieces stood tall,
there where they saw them bathed in light below,
Dionysian light such as gods would sow.
Then, there and then, when coexistence twined
their eyes engaging passing on the stairs
when he realized composing those lines
vines might climb together never be one
when they exchanged bright words for brief seconds
enough time to enthrall that morning when
a trout stirred for a naiad in the fronds
her image firmly embedded in him
when he saw her in Springtime on those stairs
forever rising upwards till time’s end
kept en prise captivated held so still
put your fingers on your temples find it
where in memory they’ll always exist
a portal to paradise entered in bliss
She was nineteen, he was eleven years older,
Aphrodite personified as Babette.
She told how she climbed stairs in Denny Hall
for a tryst with her poetry professor.
I climbed those stairs ninety-four years later,
for classes with Classics Professor James J
Clauss, who also taught cinema and drama,
who gave me an A for a paper that
imagined Glenn Hughes using Catullus'
poem on the marriage of Thetis and Peleus
and the tale of Theseus and Ariadne
to teach a screenplay class about Paris
with Babette meeting Aldington and H.D.
I remember the Sixties and Let It Be.
When times were good before that first world war
they rehearsed their honeymoon in Capri,
watching blooms licked wildly by honey bees,
embracing in moonlight living their law.
They got married when he was twenty-one,
it was not so happy as once before,
their child stillborn with nothing to be done.
He joined the Army to face disaster,
in gas mask fighting for France thinking Greek.
Came home not to a warm marital bed,
French poxed by death lacking courtesy,
telling H.D. of Arabella's allure.
When I think of Aldington and H.D.
I think of the Sixties and Let It Be
Let us seek Medea,
where the sun rises but doesn't set
where the eye goes on forever never finding
where Medea vanished in the end
like peering back in literary time
past incunabula that survived,
watching fragments of parchment
scattered by the breeze
vanish down
dry
drought ridden gutters
Dick Russell © Richard M Russell
2025
