"Intermissa, Venus" by David Sellers (Periphery advisor) with an acknowledgment of the "anxiety of influence" of Horace, Ezra Pound, Byron, and Keats

Now I write anapests to the Goddess for rest
For a sense of direction – Inspiration, inspire
Me with purpose domestic – Call off the quest!
Change venue, Venus, avant thee! retire
Now in verse anapestic I shall praise the domestic;
Responsible, sober – awake since I dreamed:
Apollo, now rules me! See now I’ve confessed it:
That the goddess was not - nor is not - what she seemed.

It’s been thirty-four years since your last Visitation
Since Cinara went silent – And left me to pine
Now I’m over fifty! Lift this incantation!
Don’t enthrall me with that which can never be mine.

Your divine supplication, in verse incantation
Makes mortal men’s lips strain for goddess’s feet.
And this one has now called me to her veneration
To expose my soul, to adore, to entreat –
For the goddess is all in the poet’s vocation;
Her presence obsesses him all of the time,
With the love he’d engage in, though no desecration,
For poets can “yearn for the urn at the shrine”
Of the goddess who holds them in her captivation
With “magical” verse and the “dizzier wine.”

So I sing anapestically that she’s still got the best o’ me
(Is that why I’m stuck with this feminine rhyming?)
But the sharing of souls is just not what it used to be
And the spell of Midsummer is long past declining.
So, goodbye, Babe, to the Bacchae - to the goddess, to the muse
Who’s the reason that my soul was compelled so to roam,
Though the heart still be loving, and the night’s bright to cruise,
If “la belle dame sans merci” calls, say I’m not home.