Actaeon and Marsyas pose the question

Of why gods so savagely guard their domains

From wanton and unwanted transgressions

Where no laurels crown the victor

Where trespassers fall to silent martyrdom

See Marsyas torn from his skin

By calculating Apollo

Actaeon pulled down by Artemis' driven hounds

His stag's head pointing to the psychological

For this is no youthful artist's vision

Not by accident did ancient Titian wield his brush

Clear sighted and unblurred

By gods, madonnas, satyrs and martyrs

Tuned to his most sombre meditation

Sated by colours and flesh enough to feast voluptuaries

Turned to nature seen by candlelight

To its flickering wavering silence

To the raging emptiness of its storms

Thus Holy places are approached

Out of time

Not through acts of pilgrimage,

Yearnings for deliverance and sacrifices

They are slipped into sideways

By stealth, concentration and accident

Fallen into when we are exhausted

When we encounter the eternal moment

Where laughing, crying and confused

We catch hold of the unholdable

And fall out again.

Then how grey the world appears in vain swept November

After we dutifully took our dose of culture

Lingering as students or tourists over paintings

Of doe-eyed virgins and scarcely digested mythologies

Which touch us not

When our city madness passes for sanity

In its restlessness and acts of acquisition

This is the Apollonian order

Against which Marsyas offended

Through freedom of spirit and absence of institution

Forming art from castoffs

And to Apollo we pay homage

After him turning butchery to an art

Playing the eternal game of stags and wolves

Passing over the holy grounds which haunt us still

Where Artemis and Apollo preside as the royal pair

So we recoil from these connections

From the closeness of creation to destruction

Unable to hold them together in one ground

As projections of man's mind

When it is the inner storm by which we a torn

As guardian of our own recesses and powers

Like adult primitives afraid of fire

Caught between madness and crucifixion

Always preferring the Pantheons

To freedom from gods