This is the nature of our sex: I take bread from your hand. I take you on my horn. You skin me and call me ‘your little red deer’. You are fond of my haunches, I am fond of the flat of your hand. My heart. My longing. As the parched animal is slaked at the rich pool, I have satisfied myself with water from your well. My mouth knows the shape of you. My mouth overflows.
Out of my mouth, the words in frothing chase. The words that are spoken before they are written. The words that fill up the air and name it. Taking names out of the air I have pressed them on to the page. Atthis, Andromeda, Gyrinno, Eranna, Mnasidika. The burning and the burnt. The words that scorched my mouth and immolated themselves. The burning book that all the pyres of Time have not put out. Sappho (Lesbian c. 600 BC Occupation: Poet).
Doll Sneerpiece was a woman, and like other women, she sieved Time through her body. There was a residue of time always on her skin, and, as she got older, that residue thickened and stuck and could not be shaken off.
Her breasts, her thighs, were stippled with time. From her nose down to the corners of her mouth, were two river-bed creases where time flowed in obedience to gravity, a gravity Doll Sneerpiece denied by smiling at Newton in the street.
She waited for Ruggiero. Time mocked her.
Ruggiero didn’t love her. She looked in the glass.
‘Tar and Dross,’ she said to herself. ‘He is only a creature of Tar and Dross.’
‘And you?’ asked the glass. ‘What are you?’
She did not listen to the timely replies of scholarship and scripture. Had she, she might have been downhearted to find that every villainy in the world since Eve, was either from her or for her. The clock struck. Ruggiero was late. The clock struck again. The Doll answered the glass. ‘I am a woman who does not repent.’ The clock was silent.
She did not repent her past, she did not repent her years. She did not repent her gold, she did not repent the getting of it. She did not repent her lust for young men, her contempt for older ones. She did not repent her sex.
She reddened her hair, she rouged her cheeks, she bloodied her lips, she whetted them. That Time, the Destroyer, was a man, she had no doubt. She thought bravely about his indifferent scythe and that led her to think of Ruggiero, her own young blade, green as grass. Among the campion she would have him, chain him with daisies, prick him by the briar rose. She would roll him in buttercups until he was spread with her. There would be no clouds that day, and if the bells tolled, she would not heed them. She would be sweet in the meadow of her love.
Ruggiero was nervous. He had been sent a note from Doll Sneerpiece to meet her in her rooms in one hour. The clock struck. How could he go? He was a scholar. He gazed at his strong straight body in the glass. The clock struck again. It was true that he did not look like a scholar. He was neither hunched nor whiskered, he did not smell, he kept no noticeable stains upon his clothes. He had good eyesight and he was not ill-tempered. His nose and his ears were clean. No-one would have taken him for a scholar.
‘But women,’ he said, ‘Women are venom and rot. Women are the sweet painted screen around the night-soil trough. Women are the lure of passing flesh stretched over the everlasting carcass. Their end is food for worms. There is no sin that a woman does not know, no goodness that she knows of her own accord. She tempts me as a feed bucket tempts a hungry horse. She plagues me out of Egypt with locusts and honey. Her mouth is a wound. Her body is a sore.’
If the clock struck again, Ruggiero did not hear it, perhaps he was a scholar after all.
To carry white roses never red.
White rose of purity white rose of desire. Purity of desire long past coal-hot, not the blushing body, but the flush-white bone.
The bone flushed white through longing. The longing made pale by love. Love of flesh and love of the spirit in perilous communion at the altar-rail, the alter-rail, where all is changed and the bloody thorns become the platinum crown.
Crown me. You do. You weave the budding stems, incoherent, exuberant, into a circle of love. I am hooped with love. Love at my neck, love at my heels, love in a cool white band around my head. The bloody beads are pearls.
This love is neither wild nor free. You have trained it where it grows and shaped me to it. I am the rose pinned to the rock, the white rose against the rock, I am the petals double-borne, white points of love. I am the closed white hand that opens under the sun of you, that is fragrant in the scent of you, that bows beneath the knife and falls in summer drifts as you pass.
Cut me. You do. You cut me down in heavy trusses, profusion, exhaustion, and soak me in a stream of love. Love runs over me. Love at my breasts, love at my belly, my belly heaped with petals, a white hive of love. White honey at your hand.
Who calls whom? Do I call you my rose? Do you call it me? Do we call it the love that grafts us twice on one shoot? Muser and Muse. Out of those two, the mysterious third, two spirits, one word … (tertium non datum). The Word not given but made. Born of a woman, Sappho 600 BC. The Rose-bearer and the Rose.
In the sea-green hall where the colour slapped against the walls in shallow wash, she held me against the rocks, she kissed me. Her mouth was full of little fishes that swam into mine. Little fishes between tongue and teeth, little flicks of sex.
There was salt on her hands, salt rubbed into the wounds of me, wounds of waiting, wounds of pain. Wounds in need of salve yet fearing it.
‘Kiss me,’ she said. I did. Kissed her mouth where the sea was, kissed her mouth where the ship was waiting, kissed her mouth on a flotilla of time, jumping, ship to ship, mouth to mouth, all the mouths kissed through time.
I knelt at the V of her stomach muscles lifted up, two hands in prayer. I sang the long praise of her belly. Her fingers coraled my hair. Love me Sophia, on the narrow band of white sand, that separates us from the sea.
In the dark places that do not need light, where light would be a lie, overstating what is better understood invisibly, it is possible to resist Time’s pull. The body ages, dies, but the mind is free. If the body is personal, the mind is transpersonal, its range is not limited by action or desire. Its range is not limited by identity.
I need the dark places to get outside of common sense. To go beyond the smug ring of electric light that pretends to illuminate the world.
‘Nothing exists beyond this,’ sings the world, glaring at me from its yellow sockets, ‘nothing exists beyond now.’
I challenge the stale yellow light to a duel.
Fight me. Fight me now. Hand to hand combat between the living and the dead. The optimistic flesh and the spanner-twist of mortality. One full turn clockwise and the rusted bolts seal the lid. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the tick, tick ticking, and the ghastly fingers creeping round the smug enamel face.
Time and the bell. The sea-bell through the sea-fog. The warning bell at night-time, the waking bell at day. The wedding bell and the final bell. The black-clappered bell and the broken day.
Under the black bell, lie the bodies in single file, one behind the other. One hard on the heels of another, one by one, the fall, the clang, silence.
Time and the bell. The sun dial on my chest. The breast plate that is my inheritance. The sun makes his circuit and drags me with him, traces his journey over my body, leaving deep ruts where the shadows collect. Time passes over me, the shadows lengthen, the dial darkens.
What time is it? Look at my body and you can tell. Count the rings as you would on a tree. Count the ridges on the cumulus of my skin. I am my own burial mound and the ancient pit of my end.
I am a warrior. I wear my breast plate proudly. The beaten gold plate protects my heart from all ravages but those of time. Time, my old enemy, who has built his sombre castle out of my ribs. Time, whose thing I am, writes on me.
What to do with the parchment? What to do with the bloody ink? What to do with the lines on my body?
The lines around my eyes are in terza rima, three above, three below. There is a quatrain at my chin and a sonnet on each
breast, Villanelle is the poise of my hands. (Thankfully, there is still no trace of vers libre.)
What to do with these lines?
I have raided my own body and made my poem out of his. Split Time’s metre and snapped his smooth rhythms. I have learned his forms and mastered them and so become mistress of what is my own. I am a warrior and this is the epic of my resistance.
That which is only living can only die.
The spirit has gone out of the world. I fear the dead bodies settling around me, the corpses of humanity, fly-blown and ragged. I fear the executive zombies, the shop zombies, the Church zombies, the writerly zombies, all mouthing platitudes, the language of the dead, all mistaking hobbies for passions, the folly of the dead.
When all speak the same speak the poet can no longer speak. The language is rich when it is fed from difference. Where there is no difference there is no richness. There is no distinguishing among the dead.
Eat the same apples, day comes, night falls. Read the same newspapers, day comes, night falls. Turn on the television, day comes, night falls. Assert your individuality with one voice. Day comes night falls.
The world is a charnel house racked with the dead. The dead have no need of words, no desires that appetite cannot satisfy. The dead, their greedy mouths, empty, their tongues torn out and hung up to dry. The dried-out shrivelled-up babble of the morgue. The sealed room where the same old words are everyday tortured and killed. They are happy with their dead words. What words they cannot kill they can ignore. The Word ignored. The Word unspoken and unheard. The unknown word that is, in its own tongue, a foreign tongue. The word in exile, locked in the crumbling palaces of the past, its glories faded, its supporters few. The word woven in the tattered arras, a royal motto in a republic. The word was dressed in gorgeous stuffs, the word due homage. The word that walked ahead of princes, the word of power; Bible and Law. The ennobling word fit to dub a mouth a poet.
Delicate words exhausted through over-use. Bawdy words made temperate by repetition. Enchanting and enchanted words wand broken. Words of the spirit forced into the flesh. Words of the flesh unlovely in a white gown. Slang in a sling shot hurled and hurled and hurled. That is the legacy of the dead.
The dead are on their way to work, grey limbs rubbing together in an open grave, stack on stack in the metal containers of car, tube and train. The grisly carriages are painted bright colours, guillotine colours of tumbril and blade, execution-bright. Each man and woman goes to their particular scaffold, kneels, and is killed day after day. Each collects their severed head and catches the train home. Some say that they enjoy their work.
Time mocks them but they do not hear. Their ears are full of the sports pages and the index of the Financial Times. Time sits in their ribs and mocks them but his language is old and they do not hear. Time does his work and leaves his manuscript for the worms.
Why do the dead give up life? Pawn the hours that cannot be redeemed?
FOR SALE: MY LIFE. HIGHEST BIDDER COLLECTS.
Hand to hand combat between the living and the dead. Mouth to mouth resuscitation between the poet and the word. Kiss me with the hollow of your mouth, the excavation where the words are dug, the words sanded under time. Kiss me with the hollow of your mouth and I shall speak in tongues.
*
Her kiss; to caress or salute with the lips; of billiard balls that touch while moving; a drop of sealing wax.
Her lips are grape-red, not ready, always promising. The full harvest is still months away. I fear frost, I fear hail, I fear mildew and blight. I fear I will be sleeping when the sun rises. Let the sun rise. Let it be the day when she ripens at my hand.
Why do I long for another turn of time? Why do I want the clock to go faster when my life depends on holding back the hands? Why? I want to kiss you.
Kiss me with the hollow of your mouth, the indentation of desire. Kiss me with the pulled-apart open space, demolition of propriety, rebuilding of a place of worship among an upright people.
Kiss me on the green baize where I play you like a game.
She kisses me. The words that there are, fly up from her lips, a flock of birds cawing at the sky. An engine of wings migrating through the world but she makes her home in me.
Her lips form the words. She scalds me with them. The cold, clear mould of her, melts, and gives way, she pours the warm honey of a long night’s work.
The word and the kiss are one.
Is language sex? Say my name and you say sex.
Say my name and you say white sand under a white sky white trammel of my thighs.
My mouth on yours forms words I do not know. Shall I call your nipples hautboys? Shall I hide myself in the ombre of your throat? The rosary I find between your legs has made a bedesman out of me. What of the Hermes of your Ways? I part you like a crossroads and fear the god of eloquence and thieves. When you kissed me, my heart was in my mouth, you tore it out to read it, haruspex you. Leave me as a sacrifice to the rhytos of your hair.
*
Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.
Time has skewered me through. I am the shadow that marks the sun dial. I am the hands of the clock. I am the clapper on the bell, the tiny body thrashed from side to side, clinging to the swinging wild bell. Dizzy overturning Time, giddy, leering fairground Time. The pleasures and illusions of the free ride on the Ferris wheel. The view from the top in the painted car, the sick drop down. The wheel turns. Roll up! Roll up! one place left! The people in front wave at me and plunge away. The people behind I hardly know. Do they see me? I doubt it. The cars are hinged from view. Get in with me. Hold my hand. Does that help? Not much.
The fairground man has a familiar face. ‘I’ll see you at the other side,’ he says, and shuts the metal bar across the cage. THEY’RE OFF! His upturned face blurs. For those of us on the wheel there is only the wheel. The swinging up, the long deceitful pause, the sudden falling away. That which is only living can only die.
Time turns me under the sun but I can turn the sun through time. Here, there, nowhere, carrying white roses never red. Mitylene 600 BC, the city 2000 After Death. All art belongs to the same period. The Grecian drinking horn sits beside Picasso’s bulls, Giotto is a friend of Cézanne. Who calls whom? Sappho to Mrs Woolf – Mrs Woolf to Sappho. The Over-and-Out across time, the two-way radio on a secret frequency. Art defeats Time.
I get caught in my own past. I see other people acting out long dead roles. I want to put out my hand to stop them before it is too late. Too late. Does my hand pass right through them? They can’t read my work and they don’t notice me. There are problems with being a long dead poet; not least being still alive. The artist dies but not the art, not even when so much of it has been destroyed, word of mouth passes it on. Impossible to silence me. I have been speaking through so many life-times and I will speak through so many more.
Go home Sappho? Jump into the wide-necked funnel of the present and slip through the gaps in history. Go back to the high harbour rocks. Go back to the flat sea. Go back to where the words began and throw them up through time until they catch in a new mouth and speak again.
GO HOME SAPPHO. The graffiti on my house wall. I live in a bullet. That is, a house locked in a tough steel shell, to keep out squatters, like myself. A steel door, steel windows, steel plates padlocked over the toilet and the sink. A steel clamp round the water main and a steel box guarding the electricity supply.
Where there is no ugliness there is no fear and this city thrives on fear. The city is old and patched. The city is modern and brash. The genteel city in quiet decay and the bully boy city, not alive, but hyperactive.
There is another city too, but we don’t like to mention it, because officially it doesn’t exist. People vanish everyday. That’s where I live.
The invisible city is a monkey’s collage of materials that don’t match; concrete block
s and corrugated roofs, Georgian brickwork painted orange to show that it has been condemned. There are walkways fifty feet in the air, wind traps, death tunnels, rat connections to monoliths made of mono-stone. Where there used to be narrow streets and roomy squares there are now the favourite throwaway lines of People’s Architecture.
The plate-glass obsessions of smart retailers have had to give way to boarded-up hatches crude-nailed below dead neon signs. I buy my goods (goods, what’s good about them?), through a plywood hole from a severed hand. The hand takes the money, passes out the frozen meat, the dead go and eat it to nourish their frozen hearts.
I work hard to keep warm.
GO HOME SAPPHO. It’s true, I do have a lot to answer for, all those imaginary seductions in the flesh and on the page. Don’t you call me a Sexualist? Then I have to practise what I preach. I call myself a poet, I have to invent what I practise.
After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn’t say, ‘I fuck therefore I am.’
Why do you ask me about my lovers, one, two, twenty?
Why do you visit a lost island looking for me?
Why do you say ‘When was that day when the sun splintered the clouds and broke the light in shards on her head?’
There’s no such thing as autobiography there’s only art and lies.
Sappho, passing through the dark streets, leaving no footprints, no trace, looks ahead and doesn’t see herself, sees no evidence of self. There are no plaques to say where she has been. Where has she been? Here? There? Nowhere? Carrying white roses never red.
Her body is an apocrypha. She has become a book of tall stories, none of them written by herself. Her name has passed into history. Her work has not. Her island is known to millions now, her work is not.
Sappho, passing through the dark streets, leaving no trace, no footprints, looks ahead and does not see herself. The history of the future has been written and her work isn’t in it. Where are her collected poems, that once filled nine volumes, where are the sane scholarly university texts? Sappho (Lesbian c. 600 BC Occupation: Poet).