Sappho's Leap (41 page)

I
. THE PRIESTESS ATTEMPTS
to Retire

Aphrodite, I have toiled

in your service forty years

& I am still alive to tell it.

Those I have loved—bandy-legged smiths

& lost boys,

defrocked shamans,

warlocks of the left,

doctors who could not heal themselves,

poets whose lives did not scan,

gigolos tangoing on tossed bedsheets—

I have mostly forgotten,

but your service I have never regretted:

it has brought me

all the wisdom I have earned.

Once a woman came to me in your likeness—

eyes blue as the sea on a sunless day,

skin pink as the dawn

rising over my Connecticut ridge

at four when I awaken to your worship.

I knew her as your stand-in

& loved her as if she were

myself in a mirror—

all for love of you.

But now I want to quit

this worship,

give up my priestess' robes of red, my gold chokers, my silver bells, my black pearls,& go naked into simplicity

becoming poetry's crone,

a white witch of rhyme,

a tree-hugging pagan philosopher,

grandmother to my daughter's

new green passions.

But you—joker Aphrodite—

send me another man

to worry my pulse

& fill my eyes with mischief,

my skin with false dawn.

What is another man

but trouble?

Sappho, being fifty & past mothering

her precious Cleis,

loved a ferryman

who ferried her to the cliff

from which she jumped—

or so the story says.

(But what could Ovid & Menander

know about the heat of a poet's heart

tangled in a woman's breast?)

Take away this Phaon!

This agate-eyed aging Adonis

wooing me with words!

But even as I say this

your most secret eyes meet mine:

“Just one more tumble into ecstasy,”

you tease. “Who knows what hymns to my glory

you will write now,

at the peak of your powers?

What are the lives of poets

but offerings to the goddess they adore?

Do you think such worship is a choice?

Even immortals obey her capricious laws.”

II. Blood of Adonis

In April, when the blood

of Adonis blooms

on every slope above

the Mediterranean,

my blood blooms too.

You do not love like that

without exsanguination.

Even Aphrodite bleeds

where the great tusked boar

gored her love.

But she remains alive

forever to her pain—

the curse of goddesses.

Adonis sleeps.

Lethe is the milk

of mortals.

III. Aphrodite Explains

Some say Phaon was

no ordinary ferryman

but a daimon

who plied the glittering waters

between Lesbos & the mainland.

One day I arrived

in the guise of an old woman:

hairs sprouting from my chin,

collapsed jaw, a few brown reeking teeth,

sad dugs with nipples pointing earthward,

feet yellowed with calluses,

an Aeolian lyre with broken strings

in my brown-dappled hands.

But Phaon greeted me

as if I were a girl of twenty.

His bright eyes revived me,

made me young again.

Asking only a kiss

he ferried me safely back to Lesbos.

& for his pains

I gave him the fabled alabaster box

filled with the magic unguent

that makes women love.

Phaon could have his pick

of young buds.

If he loved Sappho,

he loved her truly,

not for her youth

but for her poetry & prescience.

But Sappho was

a mistress of imagined slights

like all you self-singers.

& when he rowed in late,

his muscled arms gleaming,

his ferry decked with flowers,

she cursed me, daughter of Zeus,

for a fabricator of falsehoods,

& cursed him for deceit,

pelting his cheeks

with fiery menopausal tears.

She imagined maidens her daughter's age

spread upon his bed of seaborne flowers—

& leapt to her death

from the Leucadian cliff

simply to spite him.

I am Aphrodite

& I sail the skies

in a golden chariot

drawn by sparrows

that beat the air into submission

with their wings.

I see the past & what is yet to come

& I can bend the hearts of men

to passion if I choose.

But here my power stops:

I cannot save a singer

seduced by her own song.

IV. When?

When do we give up love?

My daughter begins her adventures

with that cock who crows so insistently

morning, night, high noon,

& neither I nor Aphrodite

can undo its upstanding magic

with moon-dew at its tip.

But I am wise

if not yet quite old,

wanting the poem

more than the lover,

wanting words

more than the sticky dew

men secrete in their

private places.

I teeter on the edge

of love—deciding whether or not

to give the body sway.

My blood boils

only for poetry or power.

My black trance of night

does not need a man to fill it.

& you, golden Aphrodite,

with your swans,

mean more to me as muse

than as harbinger of love.

The rose-ankled graces

will dance for my pen

even if I dance alone.

“Not so fast, priestess,”

you admonish me.

“Would Orpheus have sung

so sweetly

had Eurydice come home

from Hades on her own?

Would Persephone still be

‘the maiden whose name must not be spoken'

if she spent all the year

picking daisies with Demeter?

Would Pygmalion have made Galatea

so beautiful without

that last deep debt to me?

Heifers with gilded horns,

snowy goats with silvered horns

stampeded through the streets

on my feast day,

& maidens burned incense

of vanilla & myrrh,

strewed petals of the rarest Lydian roses—

blue & lavender—

& still I did not bless

every lover unrequited

on bended knee.

I give my favors sparsely, if at all.

I give my favors only to the brave.”

V. Aphrodite's Laughter

A sudden thunder

of sparrows' wings

& I am awake.

The sky is streaked

with ruby, tangerine, pimento—

lavender banners

divide a molten core

of cumulus clouds—

& suddenly she is there

rolling across the heavens

in a chariot of burnished gold,

her crown of towers burning

like a city set ablaze

by incendiary armies,

her forehead a show of

scenes of the Trojan War.

My lady, Aphrodite, Venus,

fairest of goddesses,

sticking one shell-colored toe

in the Aegean,

paddling long, thin fingers

in the Baltic,

your sex a great South Sea

of liquid pearl—

you cover the world

with your mischief,

making populations burgeon

beyond our poor earth's power to bear.

You laugh, uncaring—

a goddess' laugh.

Hecate attends you

with her jet-black panthers,

her gleamless jewels of night.

Poets die to become

speaking instruments

to sing your praises.

Maidenheads fall

like hyacinths grown

too heavy to stand.

Purple stains streak the skies.

Too-persuasive goddess,

visit other planets for a while.

Earth has had enough

of your beneficence.

The scalloped foam at the edge

of the shore

is full of dying creatures,

lost limbs of crab,

turtles without shells,

oysters drying out

in crumbling sandcastles….

Go to the moon, Aphrodite,

& make it breed!

Go to Mars, your lover's

red planet, & raise

the Martian plankton

into spacemen & galactic women!

If anyone can do it,

you can!

But leave us alone

on earth

to catch our breath.

You laugh again,

putting a torch to my heart,

lifting your robe

above your rosy knees

& whispering, almost hissing:

“Death is

good enough for mortals,

not for gods.

The planets are my playthings

& their inhabitants my toys.

& who are you to question it?

Sappho, for her pains,

jumped off a cliff;

& Sylvia stuck her head in the oven,

leaving her mate to become poet laureate.

Anne wrapped herself in furs

& fell asleep forever,

leaving daughters

to decipher

her coded messages.

But you want to be a poet & not die?”

Aphrodite's laughter shakes the sky.

VI. Aphrodite's Day

I have always loved Friday,

your day, my lady, the night

the week erupts into love….

“Venerdi” says my small, red

Italian calendar

perpetually rounding

off the days

as they tumble

upon each other

like worn pebbles

in a rushing stream,

as they blur into bitter blue,

round red, rushing gold.

Where do the days go—

each one irretrievable,

each one full of silver seconds,

moments of the purest fire.

Is life much too long

for an immortal?

Do you scan the skies

looking for trouble

because of the boredom

of being beautiful

forever?

Do you play with your people—

placing a Sappho

before a Thaon,

Sylvia & Ted

just so—

& wait for the disaster

you know must happen

to amuse you?

Life is very long

for gods & goddesses,

& mortals are their movies,

their soap operas.

Is that what I am, to you—

a soap opera?

Perhaps even less.

I would like at least

to be a long novel

layered with subplots.

& so you play with my heart—

setting afire in one ventricle,

a flood in another,

a hurricane in my blood—

“the touched heart madly stirs”

as Sappho said….

Ah, Sappho's soap opera

reverberates down

through the centuries

touching even our own

antipoetic age.

Poets are pebbles in a stream

animated by your laughter.

Everything we do

is your proclamation.

A man looks at a woman

& she sets him above

the gods & heroes.

A woman looks at a man

& he sees her as Aphrodite.

You merely pass the time,

making millennia fly by.

You are the prow

of the ship called Poetry

& you smile

your antic smile

as the world explodes

in your father's skies,

making nebulae

for your name's sake,