"Dali’s goddess of fecundity floats / On the rock of nudity like a pomegranate"
"Dali-1024" by madth3 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
After Salvador Dali’s “Sueno causado par el vuelo de una Abeja”, 1944
Dali’s goddess of fecundity floats
On the rock of nudity like a pomegranate
Bursting open with lucent crimson seeds.
She is dreaming of Bernini’s celestial elephant,
Levitating between Dali’s earth and the cerulean sky
On the lithe arachnid legs of her own wishful memory.
Now a bee buzzes inside the canvas:
A pomegranate spawns an orange fish
That begets a predatory feline suspended
In mid-air. With drawn-out claws, a tiger
Leaps towards her and touches her ar
With the surrealist painter’s phallic bayonet.
Yet, still sleeping, she dreams of Bernini’s Obelisk –
The emblem of Dali’s inspiration, his solar libido
To which she’ll respond when the bee stings her breasts.
Dr. Emily Bilman teaches poetry in Geneva, Switzerland. Her dissertation, The Psychodynamics of Poetry: Poetic Virtuality and Oedipal Sublimation in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot and Paul Valéry, was published by Lambert Academic in 2010 and Modern Ekphrasis in 2013 by Peter Lang. Her poetry collections, A Woman By A Well (2015), Resilience (2015), and The Threshold of Broken Waters (2018) were published by Troubador, UK. Her poetry has appeared in The London Magazine, Poetry, Salzburg Review, Offshoots, Expanded Field, Hunger Mountain, Poetics Research and elsewhere.