Summer of  '69

One must be true to the muse, said Graves

over & over in the heat

of the Mallorcan summer

his lovely Norwegian dancer

hanging on his every line

'my dear, you are beautiful

and you sink me into Eros

by your illusory love

for we both know

nothing is possible between us

no time will repair

this distance of 50 years---'

 

and you will die loving me

your poem will survive

and I will gladly accept

my exalted status

my remembered fury

at the hand of your forceful need

to keep me an honest muse

sacred in my bodily perfection

day in, day out, the

one privileged summer of love

when we praised and oiled

each other's bodies

    near the sea, in front of

everyone who made us real

in the sunlight, the cove

we both shared forever

             ******

                                           

(Note: I spent the summer of 1969 (the moonwalk summer) in Deya, Mallorca where Robert Graves was a sort of mentor and showed me his world. His muse of that summer was as I recall a young dancer from a Norwegian Ballet Company. Graves reminds me now that the poem is memory of passion lost or a keepsake from the notion that the muse is eternally renewing the poet's vision.)