Liber Veneris - Chapter 12

Verses

Verse 16

I first loved you as a measurement: elongation, magnitude, phase. It seemed safer to desire a number than a world.

Verse 17

At dusk you appeared where the Sun had recently died, too bright for a star and too distant for mercy.

Verse 18

My instruments insisted you were rock beneath cloud. My eyes insisted you were a wound in the evening.

Verse 19

I learned your year before I learned the sound of her footsteps. Both returned on schedules I mistook for promises.

Verse 20

You show us phases because you borrow light. I wrote this in the report and did not mention that I do the same.

Verse 21

The telescope resolved no goddess, only brilliance sharpened by glass. That did not cure the old religion.

Verse 22

A planet does not flirt. A planet does not reject. It merely continues, and the rejected person invents verbs.

Verse 23

Your clouds hide mountains, plains, broken crust, and a pressure that would crush my ribs. Still the poets call you gentle.

Verse 24

Perhaps beauty is not kindness. Perhaps beauty is only the distance at which destruction acquires symmetry.

Verse 25

You rotate backward, slowly, as if refusing the custom of the system. I admired this more than I should have.

Verse 26

A day on you outlasts your year. Somewhere a calendar is laughing.

Verse 27

The Sun rises in your west. I wrote that sentence twice because ordinary language deserved one miracle.

Verse 28

People ask whether you once had oceans. We examine stones for the autobiography of vanished water.

Verse 29

If there were seas, they are gone. If there were songs, no vacuum has kept them. Yet absence can be mapped.

Verse 30

At greatest brightness you are not full. You shine most when partly turned away. Lovers should study orbital mechanics.

Verse 31

Morning and evening called you by different names until geometry exposed the trick. I envy the ancients their two Venuses.

Verse 32

To discover that two lights are one does not make the sky poorer. It makes division look temporary.

Verse 33

I named a crater after no one. The maps already have too many dead people pretending to own the ground.

Verse 34

I sent a signal knowing you would never answer. This is the purest form of prayer I have practiced.

Verse 35

The receiver returned noise. For several minutes I listened as if noise might gather courage.

Verse 36

There are hotter places in imagination, but imagination has no barometer.

Verse 37

Ninety atmospheres press upon your surface. Even longing would lie flat there.

Verse 38

Your sulfuric clouds are beautiful from here. Distance is the oldest cosmetics.

Verse 39

When she left, I watched you for thirty-seven evenings. This was not healing; it was calibration.

Verse 40

You disappeared into solar glare exactly when predicted. I was offended by your punctuality.

Verse 41

Then you returned before dawn. The equations had known you would. I had not.

Verse 42

There is comfort in a universe where something returns without forgiving you.

Verse 43

I no longer call you goddess. I call you Venus, which is only another inherited spell.

Verse 44

Tonight I close the dome before sunrise. The planet continues without witness, and for once that seems enough.