Sappho of Eressos
Janine Canan
Sappho looks up, angry about the myths--small and dark with unshapely wings--that wish to enclose her name. Still she laughs, glowing like the evening. A pink and orange smile crosses the sky. She touches her wrinkles--warm like the sand, like the hillsides of Lesbos, where bright oleander gush from the gullies, fingers of lavender and fragrant thyme. She touches those dry roads, and sees herself strolling in a dusty dream--seven-string lyre hanging at her side, dress twined like an olive tree whose upper arms are jubilantly silver. Or weaving lithe as summer grass in the open square, song rising like a nightingale from the droning plane tree, where children scream and old men grimace.
Suddenly a terror grips her--Am I that woman running after Phaon, tiny man, flinging herself from White Cliff into Aegea's sparkling blue arms? Am I the midget statue with only one wing, the one whose face is broken off, or the oiled white Romantic marble?
In truth, she is a strong swimmer who dives and frolics like a dolphin, large head shining at the surface, shadow dodged by schools of flickering fish. Rules have not harmed her expressive festive face. Her voice, rich and resonant, knows every stone and hollow of the scale. She is a natural traveler, loves the warm air of the islands, smelly with vegetables and flowers. But she is banished from her home. The Church burns her manuscripts in Constantinople, would have burned her at the stake, but she escapes. Mummies sleep in the rags of her poems. The red hydria, decorated with her fine dreaming face, stands empty.
She married, they say, was wealthy and bore a daughter. But she scarcely remembers. They say she was a priestess pure and holy. She remembers sitting in the temple dark and listening. When the girls rush in like winds with their urgent wishes, she bows and adores. They say she worshipped Aphrodite. Indeed there is one brown arm warm and trembling, that pleases her as no other. Over it she runs her lips night after night, to learn forever its exquisite familiar shape--words, certain syllables, burning so powerfully in her mind no others can approach them. Alone she descends the earth's deep lips, her bare foot gleaming. At dawn her heart is flooded with song.
Sappho lowers her head, pale behind the slate-blue mountains. Gulls glide into the harbor, where her voice is lapping at the shore. Along the promenade couples preen and babble in a different Greek. In the courtyard two peacocks sigh in stone. Under hills of crushed pottery, mosaics in the sand, groan the streets and libraries of ancient Eressos. Near the horizon fish fly into the sea.
