Sapphics

So it is: sleep comes not on my eyelids.

Nor in my eyes, with shaken hair and white

Aloof pale hands, and lips and breasts of iron,

   So she beholds me.

And yet though sleep comes not to me, there comes

A vision from the full smooth brow of sleep,

The white Aphrodite moving unbounded

   By her own hair.

In the purple beaks of the doves that draw her,

Beaks straight without desire, necks bent backward

Toward Lesbos and the flying feet of Loves

   Weeping behind her.

She looks not back, she looks not back to where

The nine crowned muses about Apollo

Stand like nine Corinthian columns singing

   In clear evening.

She sees not the Lesbians kissing mouth

To mouth across lute strings, drunken with singing,

Nor the white feet of the Oceanides

   Shining and unsandalled.

Before her go cryings and lamentations

Of barren women, a thunder of wings,

While ghosts of outcast Lethean women, lamenting,

   Stiffen the twilight.