A Wild Surmise

Working Towards Sappho

168 Working Towards Sappho I I can’t always be sure I’m getting anywhere. Maybe the clue is in the way Mytilene streets drive toward the city center through the stack and sprawl of squared off stones, the one-way lanes and round-abouts. I have to live in so many minds to talk to Sappho about the books of law that stand between us, the Bible and the Koran, books that rule a world she knows nothing about. And me, not knowing much of her, not even knowing what “news” meant in her life, what exile meant and how she knew to leave the island and if it was night or day when she fled. Her approvals//the beautiful women. But what fruit did she put on her table? Invite Sappho and me into the same room and what would we talk about? She wouldn’t know someone had walked on the moon. I wouldn’t know whether she had a dog. What did it mean to say what she said in 600 BCE? 169 How did she feel about her own beauty? Hints she didn’t make, or they’re missing. The only through line is the erotic charge around women and that she loved her life II Would there be room in Lesvos for Sappho now? Little shrines along the roads in the form of miniature churches are stuffed with empty bottles and cans of beer. In the cafes, men talking, men loudly talking to other men in rooms that boom with the voices of men talking to men, smoking and drinking. Would there be room for her voice in the overlay of sounds of the men filling every vesicle? From shrine to church to altar, their images are pounded into icons 170 and the Infant Christ sits like a squalling ham in the Virgin’s lap. III The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, containing the library of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, was preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but has only been partially excavated. Another poet in another time might live her lesbian life with other facts that come to light in the unearthing of the library at Herculaneum. Down from antiquity, untouched by the monks of the Middle Ages, hundreds of carbonized scrolls burned and buried by the eruption of Vesuvius, now await their translators. What could be found there? Affirmation of Sappho’s life as we know it, or something entirely different? Whatever emerges, a poem written by a lesbian poet has a heritage of flame, and no matter what Sappho was, any woman who “comes out” springs from a burned life as a poem. 171 IV I can’t know if Sappho would understand all the facets of my life. I’ve lived with one woman for almost twenty years. We’re not alone in this. But I believe Sappho would understand the moment when one woman has been circling the other for an hour or so, a look in her manner tense and vulnerable. Sappho would put down whatever instrument was in her hands and go to her. This is the moment and the bond that begs affirmation. This is the rest of the story writing itself among us. The future must bristle with the names of women like fragrant cloves in an orange, like quills on a healthy porcupine, like hexagonal columns of basalt that rise from the earth and cool in the shape of cathedral naves It can be known, it has been written, it can’t be changed. ...