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HSIEN is the concealing and embedding of precious stones.

The next poem was written after I had gotten my kiss. It was written in the slightly bawdy style of Shakespeare and I put myself in the form of another archetype, Krishna:

Sonnet for Lady Nancy
of the Court of Queen Elizabeth
by Robert ap Rhys, court musician, 16th century

My Love, thou dost now ask I play my sweet music which pleases,
Yet thy lips hath graced my lips and, in sooth, I needs must play
Upon thy living flesh and not upon this dead wood which teases
The ears that affect the mind with eros' fantasies all the day.
My music is but a weak imitation of love's tender embrace,
Which so moves the soul, without translation through the inconstant mind,
And my soul is therefore better revealed by kissing thy lovely face
Than through any medium of science or art that thou or I could find.
When we touch, we fly, and are no longer of the binding Earth.
Our flesh becomes a moist medium by which our spirits enter
Each other and then to higher worlds, each higher level a higher birth.
Yet the tremendous power that moves us so is not there but within thy center.
How canst thou deny thy rights to ascend to these highest of heights,
Or deny me thy lovely instrument so necessary for these flights?

The preceding poem alludes to the idea that love and love-making create a kind of trance that then can transport the lovers to other worlds. This is also what I believe art should do. Art is the beloved. It is the perfect beloved projected from the artist's whole being. It is the statue that Pygmalion creates and falls in love with.1 It is also the physical person of the beloved who takes on the burden of the lover's projection. Freud would say that my projection would have a lot of my mother in it. Experience bears this out.

1 Ovid. Metamorphosis; n.d.; rpt. 1955; Penguin Classics.

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