Sappho by Nancy Freedman

and lengths. Why can’t I take you in my arms like any other girl? Do you know I have never kissed you?”
    A smile touched Sappho’s lips, and she began to twist a coronet of thyme, interspersed with hyacinth. “You are my dear friend. We have too much to risk by such nonsense. Besides, you have your young lads. That was a sweet lay you wrote to the mole on the boy’s throat.”
    â€œYes. Well, all I know is, I am going to get drunk. Why wait for lamplighting time? The day has but a finger’s length to go.”
    *   *   *
    Sappho determined to be prudent, cautious and above all patient, traits for which she had not hitherto been known. She avoided Alkaios. She even avoided being alone with Khar. She developed the habit of smiling suddenly, disconcertingly. It was a dangerous smile that focused on nothing at all. She let the days pass, opening herself to all around her. She heard the partridge’s call, listened to the shepherd’s pipes and the bleat of flocks. She watched mules drag thick pines down from the mountain where they grew. She knew it took twenty such to make a boat, for she was of a seafaring race. She crouched beside the first yellow crocus, not yet unfolded, and touched its furled petals.
    The festival of the joy-god Dionysos was upon them. Five days of theater, dancing, poetry, and all manner of drinking contests, knucklebones, trials of strength, and revelry. A messenger from the priestesses would come, as they had for two years past, asking her to lead the chorus with new works, and she must be ready. She wandered alone in sacred groves. When she had drunk in the world, the world would spill out again—the pale ash, the round silver leaves of the beech, the aromatic scent from lentisk and samphire.
    She wished it were still possible to mingle with the gods as in the days before the quarrel between Zeus and Prometheus. She would seek out the Muses, those nine daughters of Zeus and Memory whose hearts were set on music and poetry. If she could speak to only one, it would be Erato, who sang on a golden lyre of sweet lyric love. It seemed to Sappho that lyric poems, more than any others, said your inmost thoughts.
    Toward day’s end she plunged into the river like a naiad. Then, drying her body with the soft cambric of her robe, she hurried home. There was a man lingering by the whitewashed stones outside the city gate. She walked faster to her house and locked herself in her room. Once inside, she forgot the man.
    She communed a few moments with herself and then made earnest supplication:
    Hither now,
    tender Graces
    and lovely-haired Muses
    They descended, and Erato pressed these lines into her senses.
    Now the Earth with many flowers
    puts on her spring embroidery
    She made it firm in her memory and went to sleep. The man she had seen by the whitewashed stone appeared to her as a kentaur, that half-man creature. She smiled her unexpected smile as she slept. So simple-hearted were her verses, so dangerous her smile. Kentaur or man, she recognized him even in her dream as a servant of Pittakos.
    The next morning she did not leave her chamber. In preparation for the ode she would write to Dionysos, she thought of the world as it had been before he or any god inhabited it. She closed her eyes and, after a while, looked into an unmeasurable abyss. Darkness with Chaos brooding her bore two children: black-winged Night and Erebus the unfathomable, in whose bosom was laid a windblown egg. From this the Seasons rolled, and the Seasons created Love, who, holding within her Dionysos and Aphrodite, made Light and banished wild confusion.
    With greater effort, looking closer, Sappho saw the disk of Earth divide into equal parts. Beyond where it flowed was cloud-wrapped mystery.
    Some things were known. There were always seven wise men in the world and they told that at the back of the North Wind was a blissful land where Hyperboreans lived. To the South,