Masque of the Gods at The Willow Manor Ball

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At the Congress of Archetypal Fantasy
the masquerade ball up at Willow Manor was
the final event, unzipping three days of
of droll lectures and droned papers,
swapping Jung’s alchemical cant
and Hiilman’s gnosticals
for some real Heraklitean hoohah,
swirling a dervish of selves:

The Hermetics of Harvard
gallivanted on tables
naked with silver wings tied
to their ankles, knocking
their distinguished caduceii
against the darker thyrsii
of the Dionysians of Dartmouth,
a battle of soul-peckers
vastly dissimilar yet both
strong and vital, like faces

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of the Janusians from Juneau
who opined both ways out of
double-sided mache masks.
The Maenad Entropics of Eureka
dissembled logic with blue howls,
shaking their faux doe hides
against the cold bums of the
dour Saturnians of Skokie,
broody senexes walled inside
Styrofoam walls of stone,
melancholics with a taste for Scotch
who swung their absent libidos
in bluesy harvest ennui.

The red-hat Artemisians of Antioch
whooped through with aging breasts
covered with pasty arrowheads cut
out of virgin red construction paper,
chaste except in imaginary sport of blood,
terrifying the Actaons of Akron
hero/lovers who love to loose the
dogs of war on wilderness and
spy on glades more naked
than their mothers.

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Not that the Demeters from
Des Moines took much notice;
they were  too busy hollering around
the hall, calling out their
lost daughters’ corny name
in voices that were so cold and forlorn
–having grieved through so
many autumnals–their corn-silk
dresses sighed across
the polished floor;
they  were so despondent they
surely would have iced the whole affair

had not the haute Hadeans of Hartford
goosed up, touching their matronly
behinds with a single prick of
their hard-frozen baguettes,
waking in them daughterly-spring smiles,
consenting (with enough outrage
to make it hot) to get lifted screaming
over the shoulders of those naughty old boys
and hauled into jaunty pasteboard
coaches ready for a jaunt to Hell
—we see only their ankles in the windows
of the coaches, but know they’re shakin’
to the Kore like Polaroid pic-tures
of South-polar disorders.

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And that team of horses pulling the
coaches was really the Poseiodonals
of Pompano Beach, professorial
dudes in stallion drag who exult
in sexual frenzy to an ocean’s salt gallop—
ignore those hairy white bums
poking out the fake horse hides,
these guys are true troopers
of the curved salt dream,
galloping their rubber
stiletto hooves so hard
the ballroom floor quaked with glee,

a sound which roused the
Callipygeans of Carmel,
willowy and  lissome student
assistants astonishingly true
as tarts of pinkest Venus,
lifting up the blue velvet
wave-forms of their graduation
gowns for every gawkin’
dude who passed by,
flaunting rouged cheeks
round as the heart and musked
with spicy mango of Astartean tango,

moonings which caused the entire
Congress to assemble in one long
bunnyhop leading out of the Manor
onto the streets of  600 BC  Olympus,
delighting every chariot cop
and cabby and shopgirl so much
they too joined the whooping troop,
signing and shouting in happy
lewd voices every mania and thrall
to grip and fling the ancient night.

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Well, a good time was had by
everyone in the Congress of
Archetypal Fantasy
tonight, that grand bacchanal
of all that is yet can never be.

Surely imps and angels rout
in the sky above that magic skull
of a convention hall where
every fantasy cavorts
and teems, damning and
blessing us for daring
thus to dream so mythically
and saltily antiphonally
the precipital occipital
of pysche’s Willow Manor dream.

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Posted in celebration of Willow Manor Ball 2011.