Beheading Bacchus

[MoonyLuna]

The shoulders, lowered in fields, glisten rouge.
Around his head the halo of vines, a fistful
of leaves translucent as skin, a sword curled

with arabesques of the same young flora. Study
the facial muscles. They suggest more than three
hundred heavens, one for every minute

the sun lords over a rain-stained morning.
You've never held the weight of the harvest
knife, strangely heavy, its handle worn,

or felt the deft twist unhinging fruit as a few
seeds hurry to swell the land you walk.
No matter how you try, the painting will not

depart, even after wisps of Giacometti
and an anchor thrown in the courtyard café
where grapes held sculptured poses,

ice clinked in highballs. Later you returned
to Bacchus, grape-stained and cumbersome
in his tableau of tunicked lutists.

Still, he lowers his shoulders, caught in the glare
of a jewel of juice. If he could speak, who's to say
he wouldn't beg? Overripe, he descends to the tendrils

of your engraving. The sun gleams off the blade
you raise. It is late autumn, the three-hundredth heaven.
A breath of wind, buttery and difficult, stirs his curls.


Copyright
Chad Davidson

[MoonyLuna]

Featured Poet
Chad Davidson


Chad Davidson, an associate professor of English at the University of West Georgia, is the author of Consolation Miracle. His poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, DoubleTake, Epoch, The Paris Review, Pequod, Poet Lore, and numerous other publications.