The Red God

 
What god comes flying horizontally
out of a throat-like tunnel in the sky –
a red-skinned, beardless god with jagged hair
and arms stretched outward like a pair of wings,
his torso sharply cut, spare, muscular?
The throat-like tunnel whose concentric rings
surround him as he flies out of its depths
is, like the god, displayed in shades of red.
Beneath this scene, there is another one:
a naked woman, with her back to me,
Caucasian-skinned, who rises from a surge
of blues and greens, a semi-liquid stuff
that swirls around her, just below her knees;
her arms are angled downward past her hips.
her long hair’s brown, not blond, but I’m aware
that she is Aphrodite, looking up
from her blue-green environment toward him.
She’s Aphrodite – who else could she be?
So he, the red god flying over her,
must be her lover, Ares, coming now
to couple with her – but I hadn’t known
that Ares ever played this sort of role,
the role of cosmic lover, coming down
upon the Earth-girl to initiate
the evolutionary processes
of speciation and world-history –
tyrannosaurus, woolly mammoth, man;
Assyria, Greece, Rome, America.