Sappho, Listen! (Prologue)
Lynn Strongin

Sappho, listen: I’d like to ask you a few questions:
Why does she act like a Catholic?
Yet turn the air blue with swearing over carpentry?

She came to me breathing the word,
novice
& all my doors were at once flung open.

She who can manage to say both devastating
& lighthearted
things.
(Burned children
are always
problem children.)

Under her shirt,
small breasts, pears are
rising, falling, like water.

A starkness to the background like Northern Europe
in Medieval times chalks in thru sky: but
a warmth’s moving in the hands like the South sun pouring

Italianiate & eyes brown as Umbria.
She puts me in mind of
boy-soldiers

in the bud of  manhood
love-flowers put out
by first bullets.

Held in the crucifix of the mirrored window, it’s
autumn, raining blue
Bullet-rain

bringing that melancholy to the surface
one feels
when a lover lets one down.

The one safe place
you knew in the world
taken.

I thought it went without saying,
that life was unbearable,
Sappho, so only told the highlights of things.

Why do I tell you all this?
We’ve only got fragments from you
but those bring the human salt to the ey.

What if we had everything, all your poems?
So is it best she’s like a roman Catholic Nun?
Blessing herself with the four points of the Cross?

I plumb the depths
watching her bend to lace her wolverines,
giving me the cold shoulder

in fact, almost ignoring me
(who she took a long train-ride, then a ferryboat for our first rendezvous
an exhausting nineteen hours travel.

Crossing the border
with little more than a thin
jacket.

What stamina!
That Northern
discipline

to meet me
whom she hardly raises an eyebrow for when I enter a room.
So, Sappho, why am I ignited twice strongly? You, for all time, you
burnished as the moon, tell me.