The Face Of Venus

THE FACE OF VENUS

It was a briskly frigid and windy day that February 16th of the year 1968.

Venus shone like a newly faceted diamond of a light blue hue in the dusk of a clearly tumultuous and wintery twilight of escapades.

I walked the last mile of my painfully memorized path, to the hearths of my abandon.

I was thinking about the many paths that I could have taken, as a 19 year old man.

I was clothed in a brittle teenaged husk, waiting for the opportunity to establish my roots, and vault up like a young shoot of wheat might, grasping and reaching for the warmth and illumination of our daily star.

The one that sheds light and warmth into each and every one of our icy lives.

“In what direction should I engage my life to encumber upon?”

This thought would spring up fruitlessly in my fertile and virile mine of ideas.

“What should I do with myself, to be a useful entity in this vast universe of varied choices?”

“Whom should I emulate and let them be the one I would use as a map to guide me to get where I wanted to go ?”

“When shall I begin this endless voyage that had no destination?”

“Where will I be in a year from now?”

“Should I plan anything at all?”

At that point I let my troubled soul lay sequestered into the hands of our “MAKER”, knowing that he had my existence all mapped out before I even came into being.

And as the evening sun settled into its refuge of an expansively ragged and puffy, purplish and persimmony flavored, patchwork quilt of windswept clouds, that lay back, upon a deeply azured bed of heavenly sent sky.

I was astounded by the display of grandeur that my eyes beheld with a stranglehold so gratuitously.

The coming nightfall foretold of an evening filled with minute yet brilliant, sparkling, twinkling, grains of sugar crystal stars, feeding ones mindeye fully with Jupiterlike visions.

Unimaginable shapes would pour into the mind by the dipperfulls, both large and small.

The blinking lights formed wondrous mechanizations of a young mans imagination, and he was connecting the dots, of that said game, in some sort of hallucinatory visualizations that provoked wondrously vivid images.

 Nighttime was falling like a monstrously heavy, black velvet, theater curtain, signaling that the day had ended, and that the nights drama would begin to unfold with a rapid malcontent. 

It was so cold. . . 

 I cold not walk fast enough to warm my thinness up to a sufficiently sufferable temperature. 

   As I increased my pace up to a brisk trot, I could not take my eyes off of the magnificence of the days demise, and coupled with the dawning of the evenings darkness. 

 I knew that the way upon which I traveled, many a-time before, lay sullen beneath my feet, and it was docile like stones, set by the time of many other journeys on it before. 

 I tread quickly and as assuredly as a stream winnowing with wild abandon to a final destination. 

I kept walking as quickly as I could and rushed myself to the comforts of my parents home fires, all the while not tearing my eyes from the rapture of the evening sky that held me enamored so totally. 

The vision of our “MAKERS” living canvas left me spellbound. I could not wrench my vision from the perfect perceptions that filled my head so fully. 

The first star of the evening layed low upon the evenings brow and twinkled marvelously like a voluminous firework of a July 4th extravaganza. 

  I was riveted by the all encompassing sight that appeared so uncompromisingly in the first glimmerings of the night times dramatic performance of splendor. 

   Then it hit me. . . 

I tumbled right down onto my belly, like a bale of new mown hay.  

The dirt in my face smell newly cleaned, and almost good enough to eat. 

I was perplexed by how hard I hit that something that was not even supposed be there at all. 

I knew this road all to well to make a mistake such as that. 

What ever It was that I had hit I knew that it was not a tree, as it was much to pliable to be anything like that. 

In the confusion of the darkness, I propped myself up on all fours, and took a quick look around, to surmise what it was that I had run afoul of. . . 

And there she sat, perched on her behind in a blue and apricot gingham dress with simple yet extravagant white lace fringes on all of its homespun edgings. 

Her dark blue sweater and matching 

leggings had made her appear to be a part of the picture that I was just partaking of so hungrily just a few short moments before we made our meteorific meeting.

She was a sight significantly muted by the evenings light, and the colors she wore were an almost perfect match to the canvas of the heavens that had entranced me so mightily just moments before. 

I did not even see her standing there.

 The Man in the Moon was just rising up and his deep yellow glow smiled fully upon us as we got up laughing about our enigmatic chance encounter.

As I gazed about her countenance, her darkly grayed eyes outshone every other star that dared show its face on that night.

Those stars were not nearly as brilliant as the light that emanated from her eyes, on that night. They twinkled as delightfully as did the first star on that brisk evening.

She was just as enthralled with the nights splendor as I had been, and then to have such a serendipitous and chance encounter was as lucky as anything that had ever happened, to either one of us, ever. 

  Yes, and Venus was her name!

Those wonderful eyes twinkle for me still, every night, with even more brilliance than all of those stars that shone that night.

All those stars could never, ever muster, even if they were all combined into a massive constellation of splendiforant brilliance, the light that filled my heart full of the warmth of her glimmering love.

 We both had the stars in our eyes, and hearts, that night and neither of us will ever forget the circumstances of that meeting of happenstance.

And we reminisce fully all of the varied details that our collision of chance created that day, with remarkable clarity

Because it is the story of how our star crossed love came into being. . .

 And we still live happily ever after! ! ! 

This piece of fiction is clearly copyrighted by this author, Duane L. Bass 

as of this date. . . 

4/29/2020