"You're not afraid?"

"No."

"When will you be leaving?"

"I have no cargo."

"Stay...Phaon..."

We had supper and I hated the food that kept us from our love-making.

A sponge lay on the floor and he dipped water over me as the sun washed over us, sinking rapidly. Why couldn't it stay for us? I saw him as Cretan, as Babylonian, as Persian, inventing his lineage. His atavistic hands moved certainly, oarsman's hands, netman's hands, the sea's...mine.

Nothing's more rhythmic than love with waves for bed, rocking, sucking, soothing. I lay there in his arms, thinking of the plants below, the glassy window of the water, the fish, coral, ruined cities...the lovers of other days, the mother of us all, love, pulsing in the rigging, in the pull of his legs, the hasp of his fingers. The rollers were kind to us, never too violent yet tingling the blood. The backs of waves looked at us. The spray spilled salt on our skin, gulls screaming.

We made love again, better than before, this time under the moon, our bodies wet from swimming, the summer night blowing over us, bringing us closer to shore where the surf boomed. Moonlight ignited inside the water and phosphorescence added to the brilliance. Flying fish sprang free. His body was so dark, mine so white...la, the rough of him!

Were any other lovers as happy that day?

As we stretched side by side, he said, with sleepy tongue:

"I remember an evening like this, a night of phosphorescence. I was lying on the deck, almost asleep. A flash tore the sky, silver light...it came streaking nearer and nearer. I woke some of my sailors.

My helmsman shouted. We pointed and argued. The light hit the water and sent up boiling steam. We smelled something. Stripping, I swam where the light had hit the water. We were becalmed and I thought I had seen something white but found only dead fish, their bellies shining. The largest one filled my arms and I swam back to the boat and hauled it aboard. It had a brand across one side. We argued, and threw it back."

"What was it that fell?" I asked.

"Some said it was a star," he said.

"I was born in Pyrgos," Phaon tells me, his head on my lap. "I was born in a terrible thunderstorm, in my father's hut. He was a very clever fisherman but there were times when we got very hungry and on one of those times we waded out to sea, he and I, to throw a net...we were hungry. I wasn't helping much but I was there, small, perhaps learning something. Ah, that little island was barren and poor. And there I was in the water, the sun coming out of the sea, blinding me.

And then my father screamed and I saw him fall. I tried to reach him. I splashed. I ran. I fell. I shouted. We were alone, we two. My father was thrashing about. It seems he had fallen into a pool, a rock pool, you know what they are. Maybe he forgot it was there, or didn't know. I can't say. But he had been hit by a shark and was bleeding. So I helped him, as best I could, both of us splashing, falling, the surf rising around us, big. He fell on the beach and I ran for help but before I could find help and come to him he had bled to death, on the sand, his hands on his wound, the wound from the shark."

We went up the mountain, to the outcrop and the temple, spent all day alone, the sheep tinkling their bells, the heat steady. He knew of a spring unknown to me and a hollow olive where bees had a hive. Only deep in the olive grove was it cooler and we buried ourselves under the trees.

The watery brown of his body was mine. I found his voice deeper than I had thought. I found his mouth. Discoveries went on, nothing repetitive, the wind, no, the olive shade, or the moss and mushrooms.

Crushing a mushroom he rubbed it against his thighs. The smell of mushroom in the cool, dark place! His smell and mine; the smell of earth: life was a vortex of fragrances, peace on the fringes, then a shepherd's bell!

"I've wanted to be a shepherd," I said.

"It would be too lonely for me," he said. "It's lonely enough at sea.

I look for a sign of land, a strip of floating bark, land bird or turtle. I look...there at the bow I'm always looking...now it will be you, ahead, in the sea. At sea I have my crew...no, I couldn't be a shepherd. But you?"

"For me, I'd have more time to think, to write, to gather the world of stillness. I could weave it into a pattern we'd recognize as important: succor, inspiration, hope. There is a cliff...you know it...

the Leucadian cliff... I'd go there with my flock and dream as they fed about me, the sea below us, the murmur of antiquity around us.

It wasn't easy to visit Alcaeus and hear him talk, as he reclined at supper, his hands close to a lighted lamp, restless fingers, perturbed in a blunted way: the tensility of the battlefield gone from them: moving, they move in on themselves.

"Sometimes, I want to see a face...your face, Sappho. I want to see many faces, the faces of my men. I'd like to see a helmet and plume, the scarlet horsehair plume...color...what a great thing...

"My house has no window or door. Who wants a house that way?

"What of other blind men and their darkness! What good can that darkness do them?

"When my father was small he was scared of the dark. I never was. But this dark has become fear...words can't break it. Only sleep breaks it.

When I'm lying in bed, on the verge of waking, I think, remembering the old light, I think, the sun's up. But where's the sun!"

Someone had dusted his shields and spears on the wall: I noticed the black point of an Egyptian lance, the cold grey pennons on a Persian hide: perhaps they had decorated the sand outside his tent.

This contrast troubled me and yet I longed to share my happiness: the child in me wanted to discountenance reason: the brown shoulders and rolling sea never left me as we talked and I tried to comfort, reminding him of days when it was fun to climb the hills and explore the beaches, fun all day: he admitted there had been time without pain and wondered why we were eventually cheated?

Fog leaned against the house and I described it and he asked me to walk with him. As we followed the shore, he talked of warriors he had know, "strategists," he called them; he boomed his words, excited by memories and the walk and the fog, which he could feel on his face and hands. His cane cracked against driftwood and I restrained him, to find his hands trembling.

The blue of the Aegean is reflected

in the faces of the 50 rowers of the trireme

as they chant and pull;

the blue is reflected on the ship's hull