Category: Poetry

Ideal Beauty is clearly unattainable in this mortal life, like King Tantalus reaching for the ever-receding fruits of Hades or beautiful Narcissus falling in love with and dying into his watery reflection at the expense of The Other in life. Epochal beauty is forever ephemeral, forever changing.

Theocritus called beauty “an evil in an ivory setting.” I like to think of it as an ivory ambivalence, a powerful warning of the elusive complexity innate in life,a thin, unbreakable mirror that reflects the shining ambiguity of nature and mankind.

It seems easy to write about Nature with a big N. Nature is “beautiful.” Then you examine it, and it’s blood and sex and fang and claw. Past that aspect of ugly truth, beauty comes around again. Or maybe awe.

I paint deep eyes on the white canvas / they collapse in determined melodic chants / and hunt the song of uncommon shadows

I ultimately became far more interested in the making of art, as a pianist, accompanist, and flutist with local orchestras and chamber groups. Two degrees later, I still had not arrived at a “definition” of beauty, in the arts or otherwise.