Don’t move Donald careful one step more you join the human race—you know? just one second not to wonder if a feeling’s real before the trap howls shut again. Please Beulah don’t please, you’re just a—Just a what a baby girl? Don’t waste—Waste what Hiawatha, or you mean don’t make a mess. Things too white trashy for little Donny?—don’t blame me, blame your mummy she’s the one not me the homewrecker, blame her dissect HER for the little sister you’ve never seen—the oil-town trailer courts / the terrycloth beertables—your daddy’s boozy breath forlorn. Through dry-well oilman lips not one apology ever crossed never truly kissed—blame them not me, white trash nomad boy made good—Then turn your back on everything one more time, on them on me make us all pay. See everyone? not one grease spot on his phony pedigree / hide behind your Ph.D.—O doctor of philanthropy—
Now. One more little backturn for you, one more little two-step for me—PLEASE Beulah don’t do this. What Donald—resurrect your cock crowing thrice rejected humanity? LOOK! look around you look at this white Eden.39 All this can be yours the whole frozen panorama—come up come out little hermit crab hiding in another’s shell, look down at the shore WAY DOWN stick your neck out—that’s it set your eye stalks aswivel—stand on this precipice peel back your carapace—all this bliss I offer all this I can do for you Donald.
Easy as falling off a log. Watch me—
As Beulah’s version of that day may demonstrate, I’ve never been especially brave. Particularly when it comes to heights, a faintness of heart that, inevitably, became in my late teens a source of humiliation. Oil was the family trade: grandfathers on both sides, my father, one uncle. Not magnates but derrick men, wresting a living in the cruellest extremes of weather from bloodthirsty machinery a hundred feet in the air. The success of a man’s working career could be gauged not by fame or publication but by the number of fingers he retired with. An unforgiving trade demanding a physical courage and toughness I lack, though I do like to think I’ve inherited some of the family discipline.
So I found it just a little troubling—and, yes, intoxicating—on that narrow mountain ledge to discover I would have been willing to climb onto an unsteady railing a thousand feet above a rocky lakeshore. For someone else.
I think I might have, had there been time. But there wasn’t, and Beulah knew that. For several moments she held me, helpless, captive, able to hear but barely speak, making me listen in a way I’d never listened before, with wonder and terror and—why not admit it—awe. She didn’t jump of course. I say this not to suggest she was incapable of it. Just then, she was capable of anything—and for an instant, with the mountains as our witness, I believe we both were. No, I say ‘of course’ because her story would probably have died there with her. This, she was not yet ready for. I had absolutely no idea what was going on behind those beautiful eyes. But if I had, would I have submitted then to following her into the maze of her journals? I doubt it. I just don’t know. And even though she knew me better than I knew her—in some ways better than I knew myself—she couldn’t have been certain either. Not yet. What she showed me up there on that ledge was the part of me that could be made to follow. I still had no idea what else that part of me might be capable of.
On the night I retrieved—a year and a half later—the box of papers Beulah set out for me to find on her desk, I would begin asking myself, what did she want from me. I’d always supposed it was my help she was after. But that morning on the ledge it was clear she was after a little more.
As she worked and wrote, to what extent was she aware of baiting me—writing scenes, planning chapters, anticipating and manipulating my reactions? Deliberately leaving gaps or taking positions I’d feel driven to react to—toying with me. Did it amuse her to picture me plodding through material I was so ill-prepared to deal with, on so many levels?—to cast me as the villain in jack boots. Rule-maker, violator, appropriator. Charges, she had to know, I will never be allowed to answer—given the times we live in, and a domain totally lacking in due process. Except here in these pages, before the Universal Court of Ideas.
But why do this? Was she just looking for a spectator—just setting the scene for this staggeringly baroque passion play? Or maybe she saw me as the one to be sacrificed, while she—and the local news audience—sits eating and drinking behind a flowery screen, settling in to watch the spectacle I’m now making, the contemptible monster hiding from the cameras’ righteous glare—retreating to Cochrane, England, Mexico, anywhere. All, of course, for my own good. So righteous these young girls, to rescue us. Because we are living a lie. And the lie is not theirs.
But that day in Banff it was still too soon to guess at any of this. Now she can’t answer. Beulah went back to Calgary. And a day later, shaken in ways I worked at not thinking about, so did I. I skipped the conference I’d worked for weeks to help organize, and back at home felt like a child feigning illness, Madeleine hovering over me. Maybe I should have felt a little more than that.
On that ledge was one of the last times I would ever see her. Though I did continue to receive the odd report of a sighting. And, after the initial shock, a few days of disorientation, a few weeks of sexual withdrawal, I came to suppose it might really be over. And finally to think it was for the best.
After all, I was a few short days from becoming a father. A shot at redemption. My chance to start over.
SAPPHO
DEAREST SAPPHO,
In this stone cell trapped in your myth’s incandescent calculus—unable to deflect its path much longer I peer into the gathering firestorm bunching and billowing black before me like a veil of obsidian.
Before I too am brought to complete the circle of betrayal, one last time together, sweet daughter of Lesbos.
I who will soon betray you first found your verses’ last remnants clinging to the forms of the Egyptian dead. Lines steeped in myrrh … the incensed body, embalmed, embarking calmly at last for its eternity’s far shores. Seven hundred lines—torn pages greyed to wasp paper, whisper against the cured flesh inaudibly … with such delicacy. Seven hundred verses are all that survive. Listen to them carefully, listen longingly, hear them lovingly.
Once they simply called you the Poetess. Everyone knew. As him they called the Poet. Two millennia—though torn from their shoots the flowers you coaxed into bloom wear yet their scents, keep their hues. Out from dim Chaos, out from the inchoate roaring of the undifferentiated throng, one voice, one lyric, rings clearly—
And it is the voice of a woman.
I who will betray you this night, and have already begun by beginning this, try one last song of restitution for what is lost, for a sole incomparable echo whispering down through the last passionate ear’s frail spirals.
While a girl, as you lay on that sea-girt isle, bright Lesbos, did you ever dream yourself stalked by a beast of flame? There, see it tracking you to Alexandria’s great library, burning … and thence to Rome, from Rome to Constantinople, now leaping, now low and unsteady, ravaging you. Your sins were multiple, inflammatory. You the spirit unaccountable, first and final fusion of flame and desert sand—figure of clear liquid glass!
Poet of rapture, architect of ecstasy, love’s empiricist.
You were the mistress of flowers, nectared hyacinth at your belly. You mocked war, and the warmakers, you circumnavigated the world, undefended by navies, making beauty its circumference, putting love at its centre.
How you sang for bright Eros! As the Wonder Worker of Nazianzus crouched in the haven of Herod—in aromatic smoke masked, the fires hot on his face—did the song he cast upon the fire burn for him brightly?
Percussion, salt and honey,
A quivering in the thighs;
He shakes me all over again,
Eros who cannot be thrown,
Who stalks on all fours
Like a beast.
Sifting the ashes of your songs, I have found, unconsumed, a verse for all the Gregorys …
When dead you will lie forever forgott
en
For you have no claim to the Pierian roses.
Dim here, you will move more dimly in Hell,
Flitting among the undistinguished dead …
And even as I sift, hands blackened, slandered in cinders, I try not to think. I sort through the ghostly gray ash like a mendicant. I try not to think of a world all but devoured by flame.
Yet even in my despair I find other fragments, too bright for even mortal fire to extinguish …
down from the blue sky
came Eros
shedding his clothes
his shirt of Phoenician red []
Surviving still, verses in slender strips all the shades of the firebird’s shimmering plumage.
[] robes the colour of peaches []
purple coats and silver jars
And things made of ivory.
All yellow gold and like a daughter []
Just when dawn in her golden sandals []
five red oxen []
the rose red moon [ ]
they wore red yarn to bind their hair.
Leave your siege of her violet softness []
Violet breasted daughter of Kronos []
Remember what has been, the rose-and-violet crowns
I wove into your hair when we stood so close together heart against heart
To temper the red desire
That burned my heart.
The black earth’s finest sight []
Black dreams of such virulence [ ]
Out of the ashes I pluck the remnants of flowers and the firebird’s aromatic herbs—charred vegetation, incense and balsam—
Peach-flower crowns, crowns of flowers and dill []
Roses, tangled parsley, and the honey-headed clover []
A coronet of celery
A leaf melody plays among mellow apple trees []
[] fields thick and rich with flowers []
[] see the lotus under heavy dew on the banks of the Acheron []
The mountain hyacinth trod underfoot by shepherds, its flower purple on the ground []
Once upon a time, the story goes, Leda found a hyacinthine egg []
Out from the still glowing embers I tease abstractions like taffy, spin them out fine like threads of glass …
whittled perplexities … round truth … misery the size of terror … peace become havoc … my longing hovers on wings around your loveliness … that island-born holiness of Kypros
How at its height the bonfire—sap pockets exploding—must have incandesced with your adjectives!
… quick with astonishment … arrogant of heart
tall in our certainty
famous in every ear
young beyond Acheron
Now lost, after so much labour and death … Asleep against the breasts of a friend … Half asleep with love …
deep in the cushions on that softest bed where, free in desire
… voluptuous … softer than a fine dress … more melodious than the harp … more harmonious than lyres … bold as friends before each other … our knees weaker than water …
Flaring hotter still, that lyric conflagration stoked on food and drink and spices and vessels—
… to every god his ambrosia … bowls of cassia, cups of olibanum and myrrh … magic liquors … poured from a leather bottle …
Pour nectar in the golden cups … golden goblets with knucklebone stems … mix it deftly with dancing and mortal wine … And around your graceful neck, the oils of spices …
For unspeakable losses then, make restitution, O destitute flame, retrace now in ashes the scorched path of conquest, of hecatomb and holocaust. Charred geographies from Lesbos to Heliopolis—
That famous place
with its strange towns …
and from Sardis … Mytilena … embroidered, Persian … crying
Asia!
A sacred grove … a ford at the river …
Not just in its geographies lies the world bereft: hangs blistered the very air. Once there existed—
steep air … charmed air …
The wind is glad
and sweet in its moving …
the wind a crystal crash in the apples …
… the west wind blows upon me … sliding across the air on wings
spread wide …
High winds … storm wind … heavy weather … gales …
And make restitution for the birds that flew there—by Sappho made rare—by fire made dust …
sparrows reined and bitted,
a quick blur aquiver …
With quickened heart they hovered
fluttered, and lit with folding wings
the doves …
Swallow, swallow
Pandion’s daughter
of wind and sky
why me, why me?
In the fire’s blackened track, anatomies of love stunted and twisted, fire-hardened sentiment where once there existed—
Graces with wrists like the wild rose …
wild hearts … wandering hearts … hilarious hearts … tethered hearts …
a fury that rages in the breast …
for a lost desire that shakes the mind
as wind in the mountain forests
roars through trees
… the bittersweet … disgrace, rising …
… love … strong / grievous / sharp … bounden
Make restitution, O self-righteous arson, for the human tongue, blasted, for the eyes, scarred and blinded, for the ears that roar in their labyrinths, for the minds parched and blunted.
Once there were similes bold as friends, haughtier than horses. Once sleep sifted down like dust and night poured over eyelids like liquor.
Now against the lids’ blind scrim only the shadows of questions smoulder on.
… the fetching way she walks—who was she?—and I yearn / and I hunt—for whom and for what?—I loved you, Atthis, and long ago—was she worthy?—I talked; she talked / and all in a dream—what was that? what were you saying?—if only they had woven me such luck—what then would you have wished for dear Sappho?—downward my tears—what has moved you?—I gave you a white goat—was its coat thick and soft?—gaze with candour—what love now shines in your face?—I am willing …
I am willing but what have they left us?—seven hundred lines.
Restitution is a fable, a complacent vindication—more and less and other than what was lost. The traitor’s sop, the liar’s seal, its violent impress in a wax of silence—another vain translation. So what then is left after the onslaught, what is left to us? The thin consolations of farewells. Ritual.
Farewell to the fire-split wonders of the human hand’s artifice.
carved toys incredibly strange
and things made of ivory …
keen flutes, and tight drums … crowns of leaves … golden houses … a bright abstruse chair … holy altars … mules hitched to high-wheeled carts
Farewell to the humanity, into the infernal, cast unscripted—
the dusty messenger, winded runner silver with sweat … dancing grandmothers who shout the marriage song … bachelors who lead the chariot horses and charioteers like gods who sing commands …
To the gods themselves made vivid in your lambent eyes
Hera, strange in a dream
ghost or visitation but in a shape all grace …
Andromeda, Zeus, the dark lord Aida …
Hermes who enters my dreams …
Apollo of the harp, archer of archers …
Eros, child of Gea and Ouranos, taking off his clothes …
Aphrodita crowned with golden leaves …
the gods’ stunning daughter breathless Aphrodita
At last, to the girls, lit by the torch you carried—
… a black-eyed girl from Theba … a girl in a country frock … a girl picking a flower just opened … a wild girl with charm … a bride with beautiful feet … a shy little girl …
she who comes in flowers … my lazy girl, on this
soft cushion … with your blouse off, in your soft arms … to the girls of Lesbos … chaste and holy daughters, daughters of God, Priam’s daughters … my constant girls … the pure and chaste …
This beauty of girls …
What are songs of restitution next to this? What have I accomplished? I’ve only betrayed the beauty of a girl. Inspiration’s hacked limbs reassembled falter, it is just the life that lacks, that matters. You were never to be another’s Muse. In these lines I have only made Athena foolish, made Aphrodite love like a judge, like the Sun.
Sweet daughter of Lesbos, small islands must know the times. And it is time, though Time is not quite why. The work is false.
Wisdom does not love. Love is not wise. This breach, this split, I cannot repair it. There are too many now for the sacrifices. Mercies are small, and not enough to go around.
But I, who hold the corners of these pages now to a single candle’s flame, do not put it out when its work is done. Let it flicker on, and tomorrow night another, and each night when the Sun is gone, let there burn a smaller, mortal light, beyond repair but not recall. Let the ash remain that is falling now. That I might not easily forget, the fire that once trembled in your eyes and in your lines.
Phoenix BOOK FOUR
The sun is calling me.
CODEX
CHIMALPOPOCA
Hunger's Brides Page 69