Interim profile & poetry.

Mostly sleeping at the moment. Taking some time off to indulge in being utterly, stupidly in love, adore our playpartners and generally be fabulously content with life

Normal service shall be resumed soon. Have some poetry in the meantime.

She sits naked on a rock

a few yards out in the water.

He stands on the shore,

also naked, picking blueberries.

She calls. He turns. She opens

her legs showing him her great beauty,

and smiles, a bow of lips

seeming to tie together

the ends of the earth.

Splashing her image

to pieces, he wades out

and stands before her, sunk

to the anklebones in leaf-muck

and bottom-slime &emdash; the intimacy

of the visible world. He puts

a berry in its shirt of mist

into her mouth.

She swallows it. He puts in another.

She swallows it. Over the lake

two swallows whim, juke, jink,

and when one snatches

an insect they both whirl up

and exult. He is swollen

not with ichor but with blood.

She takes him and sucks him

more swollen. He kneels, open

the dark vertical smile

linking heaven with the underneath

and licks her smoothest flesh more smooth.

On top of the rock they join.

Somewhere a frog moans, a crow screams.

The hair on their bodies

startles up. They cry

in the tongue of the last gods,

who refused to go,

chose death, and shuddered

in joy and shattered pieces,

bequeathing their cries

into the human mouth.

Now in the lake

two faces float, looking up

at a great maternal pine whose branches

open in all directions

explaining everything.

Beauty and the Beast | Jaimes Alsop

1. The Beast

Knowing how you loved the birds

I fixed them to the trees

so they wouldn't fly away.

So you would stay.

.

And you remained silent

and never questioned my bloody palms

or reproached me the birds

because they didn't sing.

.

It couldn't last, of course.

No new birds came and those crucified

were taken by small animals or simply

disappeared from the nails.

I was sure then that you would leave me.

.

Finally I confessed.

Trembling, I brought you the hammer

and showed my broken fingers.

Leaves and branches in my hair,

the diagrams of Autumn

on the sky.

.

And you smiled and said it didn't matter

about the birds

and drank at my tears

like a rare and fragile wine

that they too would not be wasted.

.

2. Beauty

I came to you so carelessly

there were those who thought I had not been warned.

I could only point to the false lovers who carried marks

where you had pressed coins into their palms

and admit I was impatient for your scars.

.

The rumours followed us as easily

as if you murdered me every night;

hemlock in my evening wine,

a loosened bannister on the stair.

The dull villagers and daft princes

waited still and at distances

for grave news and relentless

until I could only point again

at their jealous eyes and whisper

I had discovered why you handled me

as though I were made of glass.

.

I know they want to know about our bodies.

Our virginity confuses them

and they are reduced to words and silences.

What shall we allow them to believe?

.

We are a thousand years old, no histories

and nothing to confess.

No one has entered

the stone of this place

in a century, the dust has powdered

even the cat's lashes. Still I sit, robes folded, crown

pinned upon the river of my braids, their diamond

points have not forgotten how to find the door.

It is kept open. Someone might yet care to find his fate.

Once there were feasts here, tables set in silk, glazed peacock

and pomegranates so ripe a look from me would tear their skins.

.

I love the quiet.

The void of voices begging me

for youth and vengeance, for the fastest way

to travel over water or how to spy by moonlight.

I love how my hands do little but settle on my velvet lap.

.

Afternoons I rise to circle the gardens, the devil's trumpet large

enough now to shade all that lies beneath it: moss, pond, the small

star blossoms that burst in clumps along the earth, so bright,

so content to bleed their red selves into shadow.

.

Come to me here from Crete,

.

To this holy temple, where

Your lovely apple grove stands,

And your altars that flicker

With incense.

.

And below the apple branches, cold

Clear water sounds, everything shadowed

By roses, and sleep that falls from

Bright shaking leaves.

.

And a pasture for horses blossoms

With the flowers of spring, and breezes

Are flowing here like honey:

Come to me here,

.

Here, Cyprian, delicately taking

Nectar in golden cups

Mixed with a festive joy,

And pour.

.

By Sappho, Translated by A. S. Kline