Sometimes I try to brush aside feminine ties, but there they are, tightening about me: snatches of song come to me: I see women with babies at the fountain; vineyards creep over the hills, ascending through fog, under the wings of gulls, moving toward me, closer and closer: they are my father’s vineyards, the vineyards of Alcaeus, Phaon’s vineyards, Libus’, Anaktoria’s; the bone flute, the whole island is in them, in the spring leaves and autumn leaves, in the stark vines of winter: the weeping rock moves through them, the defeated fleet, the red rooftops of home, the bare hills, olive trees: I see a woman, called Sappho, leading a child, named Kleis: I hear shepherd’s bells, and the silence of dawn spills up from the ocean’s shore: a porpoise and a whale, beyond a belt of kelp, churn points of light and shadow: home, home is the red tiles and my mother’s lamps and the view where the vineyards snuggle to sleep for the night: this is my inheritance, to keep as long as possible, that is what I tell myself, compel myself to feel.
Kleis has the grape leaf woven in her loom and as she weaves she faces me and smiles and I know how much love is in that smile.
P
Sappho stands by the seaward window in her library...
carved ivory racks hold books, ancient papyri,
Egyptian clay tablets, copies of hymns.
Blue from the bay inundates the library, her face,
obliterates the books.
Alcaeus, an old man,