Sanctum in Paradise

A prose poem long in the making

Sanctum in Paradise:

	In the forest’s glutless heart, where sway pale trees like cygnine dancers; where branches crystalline dapple soft earth with starlight; where birds use half-formed beaks to carve themselves from marble into flight; where rivers roil to split the braids of nymphs barbaric; where cataracts cascade to show strange faces in a leer; in the Garden of Beauty, where none ever die and all are fed by the deaths of lesser beings; in the Garden of Beauty, I found my Love and she found me.
	We met by the legended cauldron-pond where elven kings, since ancient days, brewed silver liquors to delight their comely prey. Stood by the edge of death’s enticements, where heads with hair like soft lambs’ feeble fleeces had been drowned, we knew it was not Chance but Time that brought us there. We knew because, in the Garden of Beauty, there are no accidents, and all are guided by the mollassed chains of Fate Aesthetical. No, this moment was meant to be, for it was meant to be, for it had always been meant to be. And by this very certainty, we knew Love was our duty, and we accepted her pleasurable script and yoke. My elfin Love raised a goblet from the dew-mourned grass, dipped it into the shimm’ring pool, watched quick bubbles break upon the surface like gilt pearls gleaming. 
	She drank half the potion, and I, the other — that is how we consummated our Love before the garden’s million eyes. Each drupe of the tree, each lichen and each moss, each firefly twirling, was our witness. From that night onward, she visited in ghostly winds as Moon crowned black Abyss. 
	And as she would visit me in flesh, I would visit her in dreams of soft attar. I waited in Patience, for my body had hardened into something elephantine and cumbersome, and she would come to me. I waited because, over the pond when I first tasted the eerie liquor, I became a curled colossus, scalp and patella fused, hands laced around one monolithic leg. And in my immobile ecstasy, skin sloughed and bones became fluted pillars; flesh hardened into bizarre arabesques; eyes budded into strings of shining lanterns; muscle bent and hollowed into walls, and doors, and windows; and organs became boudoirs and bricolage, orchestras, and eight-armed guards and gardens. All the sacred names of Beauty were carved upon my star-misted brow.
	And each night, Love fed me more of her spectral wine. She coaxed a pachydermatous trunk out from my mouth and nestled it into the pond’s eldritch depths. And on this aureate bathos, I dredged the sweet marrow of kings in eternal sleep. As I fed, my body glowed, and faint light reflected on the wan eglantine, the quiet fir, on the lugubrious rose. I drank. I drank the dregs and deeper dregs. I drank the dross and Loved — I drank again, and Loved a millionfold.
	When I could stomach no more Beauty, and all left in the pond was mud, the fairies came to make their presence known in a procession of pavine plumes, and alien finery, draped in sultry perfumes. My gates opened to let them enter so they could live within me forever after. And, in me, Love reigned over each sprite as Perfect Queen. 
	Now, Love lounges on divans made of my spleen, gazes lubriciously past weeping curtains of my hair, strokes my skin in absent-minded tenderness.
	So it is, and so it will be, for so it was fated in the Garden of Beauty...
    

The Temptation in the Garden of Eden, Jan Brueghel the Elder, ca. 1600