Today's poem is by Jonathan Fink

The Birth of Venus
       

There are no spokes beneath the sulfuric clouds of Venus
        despite what Percival Lowell—brother of the poet Amy

and descendent of the Boston Brahmin Lowells —believed,
        having observed at low aperture from his observatory

in Flagstaff, Arizona, spokes from a central dark spot
        on the planet's surface, Percival unaware in 1894

that what he saw was a projection of the blood vessels
        of his own eye, shadows from his retina overlayed

on the image of Venus, this self-deception reminding me
        of Chico Marx, disguised as Groucho in Duck Soup,

saying to the befuddled Mrs. Teasdale in a bedroom suite,
        "Who ya gonna believe — me or your own eyes?"

the joke landing because of its absurdity, the obvious
        switch of Chico for Groucho, only similar in nightcap

and cigar, the joke no less absurd than the movie's conceit
        of Groucho as the recently installed president and dictator

of the bankrupt country Freedonia to which Chico
        and Harpo are sent as counterrevolutionaries

from the neighboring Sylvania, all of this fictitious,
        of course, except for the movie's central critique

of the real-life war mongering and vanity of dictators,
        flaws different from Percival Lowell's quixotic belief,

his erroneous vision of Venus facilitated by the blood vessels
        of his own eye, and the dark center of his optic nerve,

not a distant planet's raging storm, but a conduit
        for the nervous system's lightning, Percival Lowell's legacy

existing mostly as metaphor for how one's undoing
        arises from within, most famously stated by Cassius

to Brutus, saying that "fault" resides "not in our stars,
        but in ourselves," a manipulative line intended to inspire

the murder of Caesar, though all three men die
        by the end of the play, a destiny no different for Percival Lowell,

buried in a mausoleum on Mars Hill near his observatory,
        and for Groucho, his columbarium niche flanked by cigars

and novelty masks at the Eden Memorial Park Cemetery
        in Mission Hills, California, only Venus persisting today

as both the still-shrouded planet and in Roman mythology,
        the goddess conceived when Titan Cronus,

at his mother Gaia's request, castrated Uranus, his father,
        with an adamantine sickle and flung the severed remains

into the foam of the sea from which Venus arose fully formed,
        depicted by Botticelli as adrift on a giant scallop shell,

the breath of Zephyr at her naked back and lifting her hair
        as she covers herself and waits to disembark,

to cinch around her the thrown floral robe, and stride,
        beyond all gaze, to the firmness of shore.

Copyright © 2025 Jonathan Fink All rights reserved
from Don't Do It — We Love You, My Heart
Dzanc Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission