Daunt Books

Pages of azure ink. And the man on the waves, feeling his way through the winter, slipping passively beneath the waves, an afterimage in his wake, a woman’s shoulder, belly, breast, the small of her back, the lines tapering to become a mere stroke of the pen, a thread of ink on the thigh, and on the thigh a long, fine
scar
carved with a brush
on the scales of a fish.

Once again limb-loosing love shakes me, bitter-sweet, untamable, a dusky animal.

SAPPHO

IT WAS HERE. This is where she stood. These stone lions looked at her; now they no longer have heads. This fortress – once impregnable, now a pile of stones – was the last thing she saw. A long-forgotten enemy demolished it, so did the centuries, sun, rain, wind. The sky is still the same, a deep blue block, high, vast.

Keeping step with the story, I make my way into death.

Here I end my days, helpless, and nothing, nothing I could have done or not done, willed or thought, could have led me to a different goal. Deeper than any other feeling, deeper even than my fear, this imbues, etches, poisons me: the indifference of the celestials to us of earth.

I could only marvel at the durable stuff of those cords that bind us to life. I saw that Marpessa, who, as once in the past, would not talk to me, was better prepared for what we are suffering now than I, the seeress; for I derived joy from everything I saw – joy, not hope! – and lived on in order to see.

Strange how every person’s weapons – Marpessa’s silence, Agamemnon’s blustering – must always remain unchanged. I, to be sure, have gradually put down my weapons; that was what proved possible for me in the way of change.

not listening to me, perhaps not even understanding what I said, for since I was imprisoned in the basket I speak softly. It is not my voice that suffered, as they all thought. It is the tone. The tone of annunciation is gone. Happily gone.

What I grasp between now and evening will perish with me. Will it perish? Once a thought comes into the world, does it live on in someone else? Inside our trusty chariot driver, who finds us a nuisance?

I laid my hand on the nape of her neck until she was still, and from the wall beside the Scaean Gate both of us watched the sun sink into the sea. We knew it was the last time we would stand together this way.

I am testing for pain. I am probing my memory the way a doctor probes a limb to see whether it has atrophied. Perhaps pain dies before we die. That information, if true, must be passed on; but to whom? Of those here who speak my language, there is none who will not die with me. I make the pain test and think about the goodbyes. Each one was different. In the end we identified each other by whether or not we knew this was goodbye. Sometimes we just raised our hands lightly. Sometimes we embraced.

but I was no longer jealous of Penthesilea. The dead are not jealous of each other.

At last, after such a long time, my body again. Once again the hot stab through my insides. Once again the utter weakness for someone. How she tore into me.