while inside ourselves we felt the leaves of trees shivering in the light, everything dappled, everything trembling.
aithussomenon, the way that leaves move when nothing touches them but the afternoon light.
[We began writing odes to clover blossoms and blushing apples, or painting on canvases that we turned to the wall at the slightest sound of footsteps.]
she was drawn towards the outer reaches of the house: the attic, the balcony, the back window touched by the branches of a pine tree.
So many dead in childbirth, she observed, and so few by shipwreck.
Her mind was a tangle of lyric odes and unconjugated verbs.
Cordula sounded anyway like a heap of rope. Lina was a swift, sleek line, a hand brushing a row of buttons.
there is also the genitive of remembering, where one noun is always thinking of another, refusing to forget her.
[You drop through the branches when I sleep at the roots. You pour yourself out like the light of an afternoon and yet somewhere you linger, outside the day.]
[Often that was the first thing we did when we were changing: we would find a sister and stay with her, taking breakfast in our room.]
Our words, which had always before been seen as gauzy and frivolous, gained a new weight as they settled on the page.
In a rush of ink and dust,
Sibilla made a sound in the back of her throat like vapours escaping from cracked earth. Then she went back to her writing.
It was the story she told herself of herself, like a sibyl who eats her own words.
A poet is someone who swims inexplicably away from the shore, only to arrive at an island of her own invention.
a woman of nerves and bones consigned to the life of an object with its smile painted on,
Somehow the indescribable parts of Lina made the earth itself falter and skip.
For every moment of romantic melancholy, there were lonely copses of pines; for every delight, there were swallows reckless in the sky, riverbanks fresh with ferns and violets.
[beudos, a short and transparent dress. Who would not desire to sleep for endless hours, dreaming of beudos?]
her lap is full of violets.
this darkly bright hollow of the body. It might be a fold of cloth or flesh, the shadow between breasts, or the surprise of twilight. It might be sharp, haunted longing that surges in the viscera, or it might be your lap heaped with violets.
hesitant to ask, to tell, with what words, stretched over silences;
hoping for a correspondence of fragments.
nervous, flighty shadows flung on the walls.
[Voices were coming and going like shadows, muttering at her, leering, crackling, casting themselves at the windows. She could hear them mouthing burnt words at her.]
[Nightmares are the visits of what has come before you undead. They claw into the seam that should sew up your life. They hiss the ancient fates that will have undone you in your very bed, how you could not move while the whole city was falling around you in blood and firelight. The entrails of birds will lie on the stones of your dreams, making signs.]
both nightmares and sibyls have many lives.
there was no language in their own language for what they knew.
there were no goddesses or familiars left to protect her.
[She wonders of herself, without yet knowing the answers; she delves and reflects from line to line. The light is always changing on the page, on the sea, on the thought as it comes arrowing from a mind strung taut: Sappho, why?]
[Virginia rose to a view of boats settled on the bay like gulls with their wings tucked. All morning she turned her pages to face the land around her: how the fishing boats skidded on the froth of waves, how there was a hush before the rains while the light hollowed and dimmed. Virginia sketched what she could in words, inexact perhaps, impressions rather than essays, but attempting always to limn that moment, as Sappho writes, when the light/stretches over salt and sea/equally and flowerdeep fields.]
Instead she would consume nothing but the evening air and stitch together only ragged fragments of verses.
[Sibella let their voices wing their way through hers, intertwine with hers, rise up on her tongue; they formed a dialogue, to which she gave the title La pensierosa, meaning The Woman Thinking. Thus Lina, who in 1907 read everything written by Sibella Aleramo, learned that despite the great distances between women thinking, we might still enter into intimate correspondence.]
l’heure bleue, that lost hour of twilight when the sun has already gone but the sky is still elusively, airily blue.
that blue was voluptuous and alluring, the skin of the sky stretched bare before her.
It was the waking of night, the eating of air, the blurring of chloral.
We were not always able to find each other in time, or in body.
the wraiths of words on a page,
[The letters were like hushed breaths on the back of your neck: you wanted to turn around and embrace them, but you also wanted to wait, feeling them arrive one after the other, steady and thrilling.]
Some acts can only be written as fragments,
they shatter in your hands before the end.
It hovers in the air just outside of time or subject, wistful in colour, its edges slightly tinged with foreboding.
We wavered between invoking our desires aloud and shyly hoping that they would simply happen to us, like weather.
to murmur to each other some words that we had crossed centuries to find.
But when a red-blooded New Yorker went to the theatre, he liked to see a real dancing girl, not a statue in an old poem.
weaving together fronds of wild fennel,
Renée watched the wisps of Isadora’s tunic floating around her like clouds, like breaths, like the feathery moss that embraces a statue over centuries.
Her voice was thin and darting,
When the stars came out she sang to them too, they were like starfish turned inside out, empty and bright.
The world was made of threads humming into place,
that was the soil once trod by sibyls, the earth exalted by divinity.
in rare and bitter moments, she pictured an object encased in glass.
a promising mass of untamed rock with its teeth in the sea.
An island, Romaine Brooks thought, had no memory.
As far as Eva could tell, these Lesbians were utterly ordinary, with no fragment of Sappho flickering anywhere in them.
But it is as difficult to invert a lament as it is to unbecome.
If grey encompassed many feelings, then black was where they were buried.
she studied the soft inner curves of wrists and ankles.
sadly they were all songs that she had lived herself.
we felt, we would be lit from within by the images of what we could be.
Evening/you gather back/all that dazzling dawn has put asunder.
what kind of suffering is that, to wound yourself for some future already foretold?
Perhaps Elektra suffered in verbs no one understood because there was not a future for the mood she lived in.
we were content to sit in rooms with shadowy corners.
Delicious shivers ran through him as he lay on the yellow velvet fainting couch of his hotel room
But when Lina leaned down to light her cigarette, her hand was trembling.
she saw the long black angles of her body, the edges of her hard like a table.
[Those were the stories we were given. When we were children, we learned what happened to girls in fables: eaten, married, lost. Then came our bouts of classical education, imparting to us the fates of women in ancient literature: betrayed, raped, cast out, driven mad in toungueless grief. It was not unusual, we discovered, for women to be dragged across the seas as slaves and then murdered on the threshold. Cassandra was merely one of many.
Was it any wonder that we read Sappho instead? The worst of Sappho’s heartbreaks are bitter dawnings of envy, the keen emptiness in her arms where a beloved no longer sleeps, an exile from one beautiful island to another. Sappho has the luxury of growing old in her own bed. Her hair goes white on the pillow, her acolytes listen to her cracked voice singing the memories of those wild silver nights: full appeared the moon/and when they around the altar took their places. Sappho had many years of long afternoons and celestial nights. Nothing happened to Sappho except her own life.]
but there is always this risk, in life, that we see only our own parts as tragedies.
Ida wrapped herself in a long ermine coat, leaving her throat bare, and departed in cool white silence.
[Actually we should say that Cassandra screams outside of language. The scream is to gash the fabric of normal life, to rend it into strange tatters. Then it is open to prophecy. Then Cassandra lives her own future.]
She might just as well have called it a chapter in a painting or a way of seeing birdsong, there was not yet a word for the forms she dreamed in.
There must be a verb in some language that means, to leave the lamps burning for someone who has not yet arrived.
we were loose, a little lonely.
Wrapped in newspaper, the flowers would soak through the words.
the story of seeing the world change colour forever, which is one way to say that you are in love.
[Then there was Virginia as a girl sorrowful in the deep recessed of a window seat, the stub of a candle clutched in her hands. If she blew out the flame it snuffed a memory, Virginia explained, at least for the night. Thus she slept. Her dreams were otherworldly birds. They flew out of a stunted yew tree in the garden of her childhood and circled the roof of her house, cawing, years of their hoarse cries and black wings. For Virginia this too was a life, the life of nestless birds in her mind.]
[We opened those books with reverent hands. We did not know what kinds of birds would fly out of them.]
It was a house with the hollows of a body built into it.
She had written some things down and other things just remained hanging in her mind like dishcloths on their hooks.
[These new lives might be fuller, freer, bu turns more rakish and more tender, taking now the shape of taproots burrowing blind under the soil of conscious thought, now the form of waves that went crashing over and under themselves on a pebbled shore, the foam caught in the undertow, the lightest parts an almost translucent green and the dark ones full of the dread sound of scree being dragged down to salty depths, stones scratching stones.]
Lucubrare is the verb that means to think by lamplight.
every crevice of her, every shadow and string of pearlescent thought, her very sinews to braid.