“Then you have seen him?”

“Yesterday. And I’m afraid.”

“Why?”

“Because what is there left for him—and you?”

“I can’t answer you, Atthis. Time answers such questions.”

I sense my old loneliness, a loneliness that was distorted like a ship’s rib, tossed on the beach, warped because of bad luck.

“His arms have been injured, too,” Atthis said.

“They will get better, in time...” And I heard time in the receding wave and felt it in her ringlets and in her hands.

“You’re so sweet,” she said and I saw myself mirrored in her eyes. And it oc­curred to me that Alcaeus and I would never again be able to exchange notes, those hasty, affectionate scribbles. Would he ever again dictate his bawdy poems, lampoon dictators and brag about war? Had pen and desk become his enemies?

Many things occurred to me, there on the sand, as Atthis and I talked softly.

 

 

Sappho’s garden, terraces of roses, shrubbery and cypress, 

has the ocean below: moonlit, she stands white-robed 

close to marble statuary: 

a nude Hermes, a bust of Aphrodite, 

a niobe, an athlete from Delphi.

Sappho sits down on a bench and fingers a lyre.

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