Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne completed c. 1523

He bounds from the chariot drawn by cheetahs
Who gaze knowingly at one another
The characteristic black streaks like tracks of tears
Each wearing a collar studded with bells
You can just glimpse the scrotum
Of the god who leaps with incomparable grace
Above the war car cunningly carved with foliate curlicue
Exposed as the great red cloak billows
The perfect anatomy the radiant skin
The long hair entwined with leaf of grape
The rich blue sky balanced with clouds
The streaky and the accumulating
That just hint of the sun’s retiring
Eight stars arrayed in circle
Or suggestion of circle caught in an oblique
Miraculous stars in dwindling daylight
The tops of the dark trees green
Giving way to ocher sometimes rimmed with gold
And a hooved haunch hoisted aloft
Before the obese reveler naked save headgear of leaves
Passed out astraddle an ass
With cheek pressed against that of a smiling companion
And another who sounds a trumpet to the sky
While a greybeard bows beneath the weight
Of a great bushel laden with who knows what
And the hoister of the haunch
With cap and girdle of grape
Legs with fell of goat
Lifts dancing human feet above the bluey flowers
Above the herbage green
And here image most strange
A bearded man struggles
To ungird or gird himself with writhing snakes
His brow creased with effort or with pain
Beneath the little horns
And above him a woman with eyes askance
Meets the eyes of him of the haunch
Her blue gown parted to reveal the pretty breasts
While she raises on high the tambourine
And cymbal too is raised on high
Played by fellow bacchante gazing at the god
Her garment too disclosing breast and thigh
And gazes too she of blue mantle and scarlet scarf
Having made escape from the labyrinth
For him who has abandoned her
And for herself gesturing toward the tiny ship
Departing
Past the rocky cliffs
Past the little town with quiet spire
The town unaware of the miracle in progress
While leading a dog a swineherd oblivious strides
Absorbed in another task than theophany
While she who turns sharply godward
The forsaken one
Stands above a golden vessel inscribed Ticianus F
She gazes at the immortal and he at her
Leaping to join her
To end her forsakenness
To have and to hold
To crown her queen
And cast her crown into the sky
To shine as significant constellation
And of all these figures
The frenzied the smitten and the oblivious
Only one gazes at us
A little boy his hair entwined with tiny white flowers
Toward whom a flopped-eared dog barks
In hunger hostility or invitation to play
Near the child’s hooves and goat-haired legs
Whose small cloak echoes that great of the god
And how child did you wind up among the divine retinue
And does your mother number among the maenads here
Who nourished your chubby arms chubby cheeks
And the child drags with rope
The severed head of a beast
Nor horn nor antler
Perhaps the victim
That rendered up the haunch
And he gazes at us
Of substance mixed
Goat and boy
Unsettling and unsettled
Lips parted
What is this overmuch of variegated world