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From “Sappho Answers Aristotle”
First Man. WE gaze upon a negro shoveling coal. | |
| His muscles fuse into a poem | |
| Stifled and sinister, | |
| Censuring the happy rhetoric of morning air. | |
| Some day he may pitch his tent | 5 |
| Upon the ruins of a civilization, | |
| Playing with documents and bottles of perfume | |
| Found in deserted corridors. | |
| Second Man. Listen to this song | |
| Dipped in the Negro South of America. | 10 |
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| She brought me collars and shoes. | |
| She brought me whiskey and tea. | |
| She brought me everything that I could use | |
| But the jail-house key! | |
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| Time inserts the jail-house key | 15 |
| Into a succession of rusty locks, | |
| Straining until they open. | |
| Do you hear, beneath the rattling strut | |
| Of this city, an imperceptible groan? | |
| Time is turning the jail-house key. | 20 |
| They build larger jails for Time: | |
| He makes larger keys of blood and iron, | |
| But often the labor is delayed | |
| By pausing squeals of freedom. | |
| First Man. An insignificant jest | 25 |
| In the wider life of Time. | |
| He has dropped to this earth | |
| To play a barbarous comedy. | |
| Philosophers loudly explain the scenes; | |
| But poets, with greater restraint, | 30 |
| Tender them a masquerade. | |
| Second Man. Once I sat and watched | |
| A scientific philosopher | |
| Place white lines on a black-board, | |
| Diagraming his mighty system of logic. | 35 |
| While he worked, the wind outside | |
| Squandered its derision | |
| And offered him a cup he dared not drink. | |
| Afterwards, in the open air, | |
| The slash of rain on my face | 40 |
| Mockingly baptised his words. | |
| First Man. To him the wind and rain | |
| Were trivialities against a brick wall. | |
| Second Man. To me they were tormented wanderers | |
| Quarreling above a doll’s house | 45 |
| Whose intricate patterns | |
| Waited to be kicked aside. | |
| I changed myself to a height | |
| That made them whimpering pygmies, | |
| And gave them grotesque costumes, | 50 |
| Enjoying the insolence of imagination. | |
| First Man. The scientific philosopher | |
| Raised his umbrella against the rain, | |
| And communed with venerable argument. | |
| Second Man. He was interested in improving | 55 |
| The lustre of a doll’s house | |
| In which I had left my small body. | |
| Walls are enticing black-boards to some | |
| And neglected prisons to others. | |
| I prefer the second | 60 |
| Of tenuous bravado | |
| That turns the prison into a threshold | |
| And jests with the wind and rain that survive it. | |
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