Poems by John Pilkey |
Studio of Jean Goujon. Diana with a Stag (c. 1549) A nymph ascends a line of hanging hemp and stands a hazy platform like a lamp that sheds a hovering glow on everything we know while marveling how high her feet encamp. We hush to watch her condescending reach as though she whispered secretly to teach her feet to know their place, submissive to her face and rising distant whispers of our speech. She rolls across the airway like a star and catches up the undulating bar until her feet uprush like richly petaled bush whose subtle shapes reveal what they are. We name her Phoebe crescent as the moon and sister of the sun; we see her soon descend from her high act to plant her feet on fact, familiar with a circle sawdust-strewn. And I have seen her rest between two acts, not rest but horizontal printing of the facts beside a lonely stag as though her spirits lag and low fatigue of limb in her reacts. Not so, immortal acrobats create whatever seems to them appropriate without regard for limb or us, you, her or him, without conserving energy or state. The nymph of Fontainebleau becomes Diana, her mistress in translation Gloriana, Elizabeth the Great but stripped of mortal state, the barefoot fairy queen Titania. Her slenderness means she's become divine and needs no longer mortal shoes to shine but leaves her weight away and courtly, jeweled play to climb another acrobatic line. John Davis Pilkey |
The Nymph of Fontainebleau |
