Seagulls won't help you find your way when sea girls will take you to your grave

[sovay]

Tonight on the bus from Davis Square I saw a girl who looked like a marble by Praxiteles—the leonine nose, the small, full mouth, the rounded chin—with bright fair hair under a baseball cap, thumb-scrolling through her phone with earbuds in. She was wearing a teal windbreaker and a T-shirt the color of brick dust. She looked very much like that art project that went around the internet a couple of years ago, with classical statues photo-dressed in contemporary clothes. I believe I could have non-creepily said, "Just so you know, you look like a fourth-century head of Aphrodite," but the distribution of other bus riders was such that I would have had to move past several people in order to get her attention at all, and I thought that might have been unnecessarily awkward. I got off the bus at my usual stop. I hope someone tells her. She was blue-eyed or grey-eyed, but definitely Aphrodite.

Comments

[davidgillon]

She was blue-eyed or grey-eyed, but definitely Aphrodite.

That encounter sounds like it needs to be a poem.

Though Sappho's might be misinterpreted.
Iridescent-throned Aphrodite, deathless
Child of Zeus, wile-weaver, I now implore you,
Don't--I beg you, Lady--with pains and torments
Crush down my spirit,

[sovay]

That encounter sounds like it needs to be a poem.

I will see what I can do. It would be different from the last Aphrodite poem I wrote.

[davidgillon]

the last Aphrodite poem I wrote.

Oh god(ess), that's gorgeous!