Warming my feet on a warming stone, I said I preferred the golden hymn and repeated fragments...
Long are their ways of living, honey in their bread,
and in their dances their footsteps twirl, twirling light...
P
Fragment of talk:
“We can’t marry, unless we have a child...you’ll be twenty-three soon...it must be like that...my house is a house of women...”
I thought of those words as I passed Phaon’s house, beyond the wharf, isolated. As I passed, waves climbed its base, licking at boulders. Its walls are thicker than most, cracked and mottled. I used to be afraid of that house as a girl and as I passed these thoughts brought back some of that apprehension. I glanced at the seaward balcony, tottering on wasted beams, painted years ago. Seagulls squatted on the flat roof, as they have day in and day out. There are five rooms underneath those tiles and his mother and uncle lived and died there, a harsh struggle in rooms of simple furnishings, coils of rope, nets, brass fittings and bronze anchors.
Phaon lives there with two men, their servants and a hanger-on. Kleis visits occasionally. A parrot, some say nearly two hundred years old, gabbles sayings and fills the sea-sopped silences.
Yes, his house troubles me—its darkness, its evocation of poverty and my own exile.
P