I. THE PRIESTESS ATTEMPTS to Retire
Aphrodite, I have toiled
in your service forty years
& I am still alive to tell it.
Those I have loved—bandy-legged smiths
& lost boys,
defrocked shamans,
warlocks of the left,
doctors who could not heal themselves,
poets whose lives did not scan,
gigolos tangoing on tossed bedsheets—
I have mostly forgotten,
but your service I have never regretted:
it has brought me
all the wisdom I have earned.
Once a woman came to me in your likeness—
eyes blue as the sea on a sunless day,
skin pink as the dawn
rising over my Connecticut ridge
at four when I awaken to your worship.
I knew her as your stand-in
& loved her as if she were
myself in a mirror—
all for love of you.
But now I want to quit
this worship,
give up my priestess’ robes of red, my gold chokers, my silver bells, my black pearls,& go naked into simplicity
becoming poetry’s crone,
a white witch of rhyme,
a tree-hugging pagan philosopher,
grandmother to my daughter’s
new green passions.
But you—joker Aphrodite—
send me another man
to worry my pulse
& fill my eyes with mischief,
my skin with false dawn.
What is another man
but trouble?
Sappho, being fifty & past mothering
her precious Cleis,
loved a ferryman
who ferried her to the cliff
from which she jumped—
or so the story says.
(But what could Ovid & Menander
know about the heat of a poet’s heart
tangled in a woman’s breast?)
Take away this Phaon!
This agate-eyed aging Adonis
wooing me with words!
But even as I say this
your most secret eyes meet mine:
“Just one more tumble into ecstasy,”
you tease. “Who knows what hymns to my glory
you will write now,
at the peak of your powers?
What are the lives of poets
but offerings to the goddess they adore?
Do you think such worship is a choice?
Even immortals obey her capricious laws.”
II. Blood of Adonis
In April, when the blood
of Adonis blooms
on every slope above
the Mediterranean,
my blood blooms too.
You do not love like that
without exsanguination.
Even Aphrodite bleeds
where the great tusked boar
gored her love.
But she remains alive
forever to her pain—
the curse of goddesses.
Adonis sleeps.
Lethe is the milk
of mortals.
III. Aphrodite Explains
Some say Phaon was
no ordinary ferryman
but a daimon
who plied the glittering waters
between Lesbos & the mainland.
One day I arrived
in the guise of an old woman:
hairs sprouting from my chin,
collapsed jaw, a few brown reeking teeth,
sad dugs with nipples pointing earthward,
feet yellowed with calluses,
an Aeolian lyre with broken strings
in my brown-dappled hands.
But Phaon greeted me
as if I were a girl of twenty.
His bright eyes revived me,
made me young again.
Asking only a kiss
he ferried me safely back to Lesbos.
& for his pains
I gave him the fabled alabaster box
filled with the magic unguent
that makes women love.
Phaon could have his pick
of young buds.
If he loved Sappho,
he loved her truly,
not for her youth
but for her poetry & prescience.
But Sappho was
a mistress of imagined slights
like all you self-singers.
& when he rowed in late,
his muscled arms gleaming,
his ferry decked with flowers,
she cursed me, daughter of Zeus,
for a fabricator of falsehoods,
& cursed him for deceit,
pelting his cheeks
with fiery menopausal tears.
She imagined maidens her daughter’s age
spread upon his bed of seaborne flowers—
& leapt to her death
from the Leucadian cliff
simply to spite him.
I am Aphrodite
& I sail the skies
in a golden chariot
drawn by sparrows
that beat the air into submission
with their wings.
I see the past & what is yet to come
& I can bend the hearts of men
to passion if I choose.
But here my power stops:
I cannot save a singer
seduced by her own song.
IV. When?
When do we give up love?
My daughter begins her adventures
with that cock who crows so insistently
morning, night, high noon,
& neither I nor Aphrodite
can undo its upstanding magic
with moon-dew at its tip.
But I am wise
if not yet quite old,
wanting the poem
more than the lover,
wanting words
more than the sticky dew
men secrete in their
private places.
I teeter on the edge
of love—deciding whether or not
to give the body sway.
My blood boils
only for poetry or power.
My black trance of night
does not need a man to fill it.
& you, golden Aphrodite,
with your swans,
mean more to me as muse
than as harbinger of love.
The rose-ankled graces
will dance for my pen
even if I dance alone.
“Not so fast, priestess,”
you admonish me.
“Would Orpheus have sung
so sweetly
had Eurydice come home
from Hades on her own?
Would Persephone still be
‘the maiden whose name must not be spoken’
if she spent all the year
picking daisies with Demeter?
Would Pygmalion have made Galatea
so beautiful without
that last deep debt to me?
Heifers with gilded horns,
snowy goats with silvered horns
stampeded through the streets
on my feast day,
& maidens burned incense
of vanilla & myrrh,
strewed petals of the rarest Lydian roses—
blue & lavender—
& still I did not bless
every lover unrequited
on bended knee.
I give my favors sparsely, if at all.
I give my favors only to the brave.”
V. Aphrodite’s Laughter
A sudden thunder
of sparrows’ wings
& I am awake.
The sky is streaked
with ruby, tangerine, pimento—
lavender banners
divide a molten core
of cumulus clouds—
& suddenly she is there
rolling across the heavens
in a chariot of burnished gold,
her crown of towers burning
like a city set ablaze
by incendiary armies,
her forehead a show of
scenes of the Trojan War.
My lady, Aphrodite, Venus,
fairest of goddesses,
sticking one shell-colored toe
in the Aegean,
paddling long, thin fingers
in the Baltic,
your sex a great South Sea
of liquid pearl—
you cover the world
with your mischief,
making populations burgeon
beyond our poor earth’s power to bear.
You laugh, uncaring—
a goddess’ laugh.
Hecate attends you
with her jet-black panthers,
her gleamless jewels of night.
Poets die to become
speaking instruments
to sing your praises.
Maidenheads fall
like hyacinths grown
too heavy to stand.
Purple stains streak the skies.
Too-persuasive goddess,
visit other planets for a while.
Earth has had enough
of your beneficence.
The scalloped foam at the edge
of the shore
is full of dying creatures,
lost limbs of crab,
turtles without shells,
oysters drying out
in crumbling sandcastles….
Go to the moon, Aphrodite,
& make it breed!
Go to Mars, your lover’s
red planet, & raise
the Martian plankton
into spacemen & galactic women!
If anyone can do it,
you can!
But leave us alone
on earth
to catch our breath.
You laugh again,
putting a torch to my heart,
lifting your robe
above your rosy knees
& whispering, almost hissing:
“Death is
good enough for mortals,
not for gods.
The planets are my playthings
& their inhabitants my toys.
& who are you to question it?
Sappho, for her pains,
jumped off a cliff;
& Sylvia stuck her head in the oven,
leaving her mate to become poet laureate.
Anne wrapped herself in furs
& fell asleep forever,
leaving daughters
to decipher
her coded messages.
But you want to be a poet & not die?”
Aphrodite’s laughter shakes the sky.
VI. Aphrodite’s Day
I have always loved Friday,
your day, my lady, the night
the week erupts into love….
“Venerdi” says my small, red
Italian calendar
perpetually rounding
off the days
as they tumble
upon each other
like worn pebbles
in a rushing stream,
as they blur into bitter blue,
round red, rushing gold.
Where do the days go—
each one irretrievable,
each one full of silver seconds,
moments of the purest fire.
Is life much too long
for an immortal?
Do you scan the skies
looking for trouble
because of the boredom
of being beautiful
forever?
Do you play with your people—
placing a Sappho
before a Thaon,
Sylvia & Ted
just so—
& wait for the disaster
you know must happen
to amuse you?
Life is very long
for gods & goddesses,
& mortals are their movies,
their soap operas.
Is that what I am, to you—
a soap opera?
Perhaps even less.
I would like at least
to be a long novel
layered with subplots.
& so you play with my heart—
setting afire in one ventricle,
a flood in another,
a hurricane in my blood—
“the touched heart madly stirs”
as Sappho said….
Ah, Sappho’s soap opera
reverberates down
through the centuries
touching even our own
antipoetic age.
Poets are pebbles in a stream
animated by your laughter.
Everything we do
is your proclamation.
A man looks at a woman
& she sets him above
the gods & heroes.
A woman looks at a man
& he sees her as Aphrodite.
You merely pass the time,
making millennia fly by.
You are the prow
of the ship called Poetry
& you smile
your antic smile
as the world explodes
in your father’s skies,
making nebulae
for your name’s sake,
amen.
Both here on earth
& in the skies
every day is
Aphrodite’s day.
VII. Conjuring Her
Mandarin oranges,
love apples,
honey in a jar,
last year’s rose petals,
dried gardenia whose pungency
lingers in the air…
& a shred of brown paper
burned at the edges
with his secret name upon it
in heavy grease pencil,
my name, too.
Love has ignited
the edges of my life
& the honey
saturates his name
at the bottom
of the round, clear jar—
a little womb of wishes.
I have kissed the lid,
lit incense sacred
to you, my lady,
& now I wait
for him to fill
my honey jar,
if it pleases you.
It pleased you to see
Arion rescued by his lyre,
clinging to it in the stormy sea
as if it were a dolphin’s back.
It pleased you that Sappho’s
fragmentary verses
went to make sarcophagi
for the sacred alligators of Egypt—
thus were saved,
—a papier-mâché patchwork
quilt of poetry
spared by time.
Lady of papyri & sarcophagi,
lady of lovers’ jumps,
lady of spells Scincense,
of goats & heifers
bleating to the sacrifice,
of maidens & madonnas
silently doing the same,
I bow my head
to your unending miracles—
I surrender to your power.
Some say love is a disease,
a fire in the blood that burns
every human city down.
I’ll take my chances.
Before I curl
like incense to the sky,
before I study how to die,
drizzle the honey
of my wishes
on my waiting tongue…
teach me how to fly.
VIII. Sappho: a footnote
A nightingale sang
at her birth,
the same nightingale
who sang
in Keats’ garden.
She tried to hold
the sky in her two arms
& failed—
as poets always fail—
& yet the effort
of their reach
is all.
She understood
that her life
was the river
that opened into the sea
of her dying.
She understood
this river flowed
in words.
Her harp
buoyed her like Arion’s
as she drifted toward
the all-forgiving sea.
Most of her words
vanished. Millennia
flew by.
The goddess she worshiped,
born of the sea’s pale foam,
grew younger
& more beautiful
as the words of the poet
dissolved.
All this was foretold.
Sappho burned
& Christians burned
her words.
In the Egyptian desert,
bits of papyri
held notations
of her flaming heart.
Aphrodite smiles,
remembering Sappho’s words:
“If death were good,
even the gods would die.”
You who put your trust
in words when flesh decays,
know that even words
are swept away—
& what remains?
Aphrodite’s smile—
the foam at her rosy feet
where the dying dolphins play.
IX. Her Power
All around the crumbling
limestone shores
of the Mediterranean
there are traces
of her power—
the queen of Cythera,
foam-footed Aphrodite,
she who makes the muses
dance together,
plaiting poppies
in her golden hair….
Temples to her capriciousness
stand everywhere
facing the sea
which is full of nereids,
dolphins, blue & gold tiles
of sunlight, Sheaves where
the moon hides between pregnancies.
I have always been drawn
to these shores
as if I knew
the goddess I worshiped
would be found
looping the ancient isles
made of limestone,
most soluble of rocks.
She took the moon on her tongue,
the silver wafer
giving a lemony light.
She watched the waves erase
her filigreed footsteps.
She is everywhere & nowhere—
provoking love in the least
recess of longing.
She is the goddess for whom
the earth continues to spin—
in her turning
all endings end
& all beginnings
begin.