Jupiter’s Darling (for Esther Williams)

I hope Jupiter’s Darling does some measure of justice to one of Hollywood’s supreme heroines – saviour of the world’s health!

Immersion and Adoration

 

Flesh becomes firm stone, stone becomes mellow flesh

The statues frozen, perfect in form breathed primal heat

Through their impervious stone.

How she yearned to freeze in the heat of eternity!

How she ached to scale their heights of permanence,

Her lithe mobility, her passion, ever self-reviving

To draw endless breaths of massive adoration.

But where is the choice, between stone and film,

Monument and media archive?

Now we revel in captured stills of beckoning motions

From all those gracious forms,

Circled by her lissome body.

The Human Submarine

 

Embracing the Coral Kaleidoscope

That form, counterpointing the coral’s rainbow symphony,

Sub-aqua’s perfect magnetism.

Wrestling for Life

And she was Rome’s saviour – drawing from a watery ecstasy

To quench the fires of destruction, blow them into an exquisite vapour,

Delicate fabrics cast on piles of discarded armour? Swords truly into ploughshares?

Matched Strengths

 

Esther, the radiant epitome,

Drawing the teeming masses into benign immersion –

Priestess of health and wholeness,

My Bathing Beauty, My Million Dollar Mermaid,

So deliciously dangerous when wet,

Adored by Jupiter and Neptune alike

My breath and heart suspended

By the rainbow spectrum of your costume colours!

Drawing me with your single and double magnet!

Poised for the Plunge

 

Wouldn’t Saturn, Uranus, Pluto simmer with desire,

Though perhaps you are Urania –

Also the supreme horserider, the catalyst

Bringing out the burgeoning athlete in the most timorous

You never fail to give me the thrill of a romance,

To be on an island with you would be Paradise,

My memory would be this time for keeps.

Toned Loveliness

 

Yes, you were always swimming in men,

I’d love to take you out to the ball game

“Everyone in the pool!” – That’s my motto too:

Oh – to become my ideal self and match you,

As I believe but a handful did.

 

Would that it were Me!

 

Could you turn me into a Bromfield?

What wonder to be you would adore me in that boudoir!

 

David Russell