Love Poem with Statue of Juno

James King

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Her head a later addition, made of different marble than her body. I know the feeling. Love, have you ever thought, touching the tenuous connection of your neck, that someone in a pith helmet might have plucked you from the rocks and stuck you onto yourself, spirited you under cover of night from the homeland of your soul? If you were here, we’d be muddling like philosophers in the white shadow of a thirteen-foot-tall goddess, or trying to poke her toes. Because you’re not, I roam the Greek and Roman wing, stealing for you pictures of red and black pots, painted with bleeding heroes— like a bowerbird, like an Englishman—and of Juno, imperious, impervious, dream woman. All the signs say don’t touch and I want to touch you. I want your thighs which are nothing like stone. The rule is against me. I stand beneath the queen of the gods with her substitute crown, her stony gaze, her robes like rainfall around her knees. Some part of me is always somewhere where it actually belongs.