Sappho's Boat: Poems

by Eileen Myles

Genres: Poetry

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Eileen Myles is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades.

Reviews

[mwpm · Rating 4 out of 5]

We had a fight so
We didn't fuck at night.
The unemployment office was a series
Of lines and I signed up.
And at home I ate Philadelphia cream cheese,
Thomas's english muffins.
Colour xeroxed Catholic Comics.
Sent to Katz. "Isn't colour xerox a miracle, Steve?"
Post Office. Cobbler's.
Big library where read Sappho.
Holes and all. Feel the wind
Shifting through. Aeolics
Shiver when Sappho speaks of her
Heart Beat. It
Pounding down through the ages.
Old adrenaline, gives me a rush.
And morning sex was nice. In
morning light. Day blast-off.
Rusharound. Through the lightness.
Nightness come cover me. Let's
Go around again.

- Tuesday Brightness, pg. 7

*

Language interests me
more than life
I just want to see where it goes --
explaining tonight I get
on a train enter a big party
dance go make love with you
go mail a letter tomorrow
go invent cigarettes.
Stop I want to turn the wheel!
so slightly to the right
examine evening through late-day
or morning glimpses --
Um apologetically in the rush

of colour teevee, hot poem
by her who writes songs
enhances action
in the embrace of a tall cowboy
I think I see snow
"Alive burden"
I think we both are looking in
the Window.

- Poem On The Profession, pg. 24

*

It's such a bust to call this an occupation
You hand me a peach or a pear
And criticize the peach as I bite into it.
Somehow being so blammed down
A pleasure, or what brings me closer
To the sweetness that the truly mad contain.

I hate you like I hated nuns.
You don't have to stop
Somehow you've got this kind of permission

Dominance floods the room with its dark wings
I either stand up and screech like a chicken

Or what brings me nearer is this separation
Here, where I can slither my feelings
Across sheer ice.

- Madeline Revenge, pg. 31

*

was filled by RD Laing
Cream and if
only I could get on that bus
and go away.
Love never sang nor ever
sometimes I felt quite mad.

But often I was excited
there were things I thought
were everything But of course
there weren't everything.

But everything wasn't something
I let go of Shapeless
but imploring
I picked up pricks & books
no, books & pricks.

- Till Death Do Us Part, for Anne McDonough, pg. 32

*

I was walking along the sidewalk
in all the daily pain
& miserable faces & awful air.
Up above in a flower box
were yellow tulips, too real
to be real, so big
and sexual-looking in
that funny way flowers
always are. I guess
they were like heads
poking in from another
world. How do you
like Wednesday, you
beautiful things?

- Yellow Tulips, pg. 38

*

Then a group of you
found singing in a park
around a stupid old historical statue
Some tulips are completely
red, and some are terribly yellow.
Then the others shaded by both
maybe less clearly this or that.
But the mixed tulips
I love for their compassion.
They soften the blows
of this & that
I find them very beautiful

- New York Tulips, pg. 39

*

Today, May 30th, Joan
of Arc was burned.
She was 19 and
when she died
a man saw white doves
fly from her mouth.

Joan was born in 1512
between Lorraine
and Champagne. Joan
was raised on legends.
Merlin said France would be
lost by a woman and saved
by a virgin. Joan was
not an adventurous girl, not
a tomboy, but very dreamy,
good, stay-at-home,
the baby of the family.
Joan never got her period.

She heard these voices
in the bells, she saw angels
in coloured glass. She believed
the sun moved around
the earth because that's
what she saw. She believed
God wanted Charles VII
to be King of France
because that's what Michael,
Catherine & Margaret told
her when she listened to
the bells. Her father
said he'd drown her
if she didn't stop this
nonsense.

She was 19 years old
when they burned her body in the middle of town
while she was still alive. A white dove
came out of her mouth as she died.
Four hundred and thirty-one years ago today.
A dove leaped right out of her mouth.

- Joan, pg. 40-41

*

I was just in this room
where one friend of mine
just quit smoking & this guy
was smoking Camels & another
woman was smoking ginseng
I laughed at her & asked for one.
Two women were walking around
the juicer -- one wasn't bad-looking
the other one was sort of yellow
or orange, sallow, scarey.
I thought she looked like death.
I thought -- that ain't health.
This year I discovered that
it's fun to have a body --
something to be vain about.
I knew that when I was 19
but somehow or other
I forgot. Anxiety gets me sexy.
To a point. Then I'll
start drinking & smoking or something
bu at least until then
I'll let the barometer rise
the energy gets me around.
I'm into being a day animal
at night I can slow down
& look out of the corners
of my eyes. At the night.
It's a scurrying animal I think
feels like a bat sometimes
or any very dark bird alternately
sailing toward & against light.
I suppose I'm looking for a woman
-- rowing in the old night boat.
I like the dark water, trying
to imagine where you'd go tonight
or else just throwing
my head back
watching the sky
wishing I could eat
all
those flowers.

- 1980: The Year Of The Ox, pg. 55-56

[Lizzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty gooooood stuff. Cool to read their earlier stuff