The watery brown of his body was mine. I found his voice deeper than I had thought. I found his mouth. Discoveries went on, nothing repetitive, the wind, no, the olive shade, or the moss and mushrooms. Crushing a mushroom he rubbed it against his thighs. The smell of mushroom in the cool, dark place! His smell and mine; the smell of earth: life was a vortex of fragrances, peace on the fringes, then a shepherd’s bell!
“It would be too lonely for me,” he said. “It’s lonely enough at sea. I look for a sign of land, a strip of floating bark, land bird or turtle. I look...there at the bow I’m always looking...now it will be you, ahead, in the sea. At sea I have my crew...no, I couldn’t be a shepherd. But you?”
“For me, I’d have more time to think, to write, to gather the world of stillness. I could weave it into a pattern we’d recognize as important: succor, inspiration, hope. There is a cliff...you know it... the Leucadian cliff... I’d go there with my flock and dream as they fed about me, the sea below us, the murmur of antiquity around us.
It wasn’t easy to visit Alcaeus and hear him talk, as he reclined at supper, his hands close to a lighted lamp, restless fingers, perturbed in a blunted way: the tensility of the battlefield gone from them: moving, they move in on themselves.
“Sometimes, I want to see a face...your face, Sappho. I want to see many faces, the faces of my men. I’d like to see a helmet and plume, the scarlet horsehair plume...color...what a great thing...
“My house has no window or door. Who wants a house that way?
“What of other blind men and their darkness! What good can that darkness do them?
“When my father was small he was scared of the dark. I never was. But this dark has become fear...words can’t break it. Only sleep breaks it. When I’m lying in bed, on the verge of waking, I think, remembering the old light, I think, the sun’s up. But where’s the sun!”
Someone had dusted his shields and spears on the wall: I noticed the black point of an Egyptian lance, the cold grey pennons on a Persian hide: perhaps they had decorated the sand outside his tent.
This contrast troubled me and yet I longed to share my happiness: the child in me wanted to discountenance reason: the brown shoulders and rolling sea never left me as we talked and I tried to comfort, reminding him of days when it was fun to climb the hills and explore the beaches, fun all day: he admitted there had been time without pain and wondered why we were eventually cheated?