Five After Simeon Solomon, by Bryn Gribben

Death Awakening Sleep, by Simeon Solomon (England) 1896

​Claws of Wire, or the Nightmare of Simeon Solomon
 
I call it Death Awakening Sleep—where veil is drawn over a veil.
Night, Sleep, Death and the Stars, they are the themes that I love best, 
where one can live and yearn, drift and sail
 
the dark ocean of the heart, and caressed
unwearied, singing as the whale 
sings deeply, loving without watching for arrest.
 
A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, I called my pale
poem of desire—still, vivid in its vision, dressed 
and draped with possibilities.  To hang up on a nail
 
my symbols’ sighing is the swelling of my breast
wave-like upon all shores I wish to avail
myself, reveal my glittering thick skin, to crest
 
and break, wash clean what never can be clear, bail
out my drowning passions and find rest.
But no—for me, no waiting Death with sleep.  It hails
 
not the merciful stars but, at fear’s behest,
the coupling of a white ewe and a cat, who never fail
to birth a beast with claws of wire that dig into my chest.
 
Night after night, it comes to me—the wail
of beast, the tearing of my lusty lungs.  I confess
to speak the love who dare not speak its name, frail
 
only in fidelity, and never weak in wanting.  Arrest
me if your wanting is to wreck my tale 
of beauty to a world in waiting, of mysteries unguessed.
 
I’m already pursued nightly—fresh prey to kill, assail.
Still, I love my Shadows, and scorn the sunrise in the west.
When I am buried, kept in a place firmer than a jail 
 
by weighted stone, may my dark tomb divest
dear Night of dread. Until the day break, like shattered shale,
and the shadows flee away, claws in my back, the dark is blest.

Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene, by Simeon Solomon (England) 1864

A Fancy So Probable as to Seem Like Memory

“Pre-Raphaelitism has but one principle, that of absolute, uncompromising truth in all that it does, obtained by working everything, down to the most minute detail, from nature… always endeavouring to conceive a fact as it really was likely to have happened [to make] their fancy so probable as to seem like memory.”
John Ruskin, Notes on Architecture and Art
 
I. Sappho and Erinnna in a Garden at Mytilene
 
Picture it:  
Lesbia in spring.  
 
The olives are silver moons hung on branches,
the marble bench warm from the fading sun, from
our bodies frozen here, as still as the smallest deer,
 
smaller than your little hand, grasping mine
as I bend my cheek to yours, still as the doves 
behind us, mirrored bills and coos.
 
See how even the roses fall to be near us?
See the jealous crow who cannot look away from the doves?  
 
Though you seem to look outwards, you feel
only my breath upon your rose of a cheek, roses of lips.
 
I see nothing, only feel you. 
The lyre’s been cast aside, I turn as if in movement, but 
in fact, I’m still, as nothing ever
could move me from here again.
 
II. Erinna Taken from Sappho
 
I will not even paint it. 
Pen and ink it, think it
into being, but I will not give this colour.
 
What bench is this, a beam
on which you balance your desires,
man and woman? 
 
What branch is this, leaves lost,
olives withering with my song?
 
Even the small bust of Aphrodite hunches,
hand with no heft, reaching out for nothing.
 
When I draw this, you will look anywhere 
but at him, hand swatting his 
from the unbared breast I bring now
into memory with my gaze. 
 
If there is music in this scene,
it’s yours, viewer, to play—I’ve left 
the lyre, face outward, as hers once was 
in ecstasy, as mine now never can be.  
 
III.  Simeon Solomon, Jailed 1873 and 1874
 
Picture it:  he was sixty years old, a stableman
with arms unlike any I could figure, 
the tea room not as cozy as you’d think.
 
That’s what we’d call a urinal—a “tea room,” 
or a “cottage”—some place to be alone
to feel our ways into the marble body 
of a willing man, amidst the mossy tiles,
privacy screens be damned.
 
A hand about my waist, another on my chest,
the doves were singing outside on the railing.
Bodies bending like branches towards water 
or sun, we rose and we fell, 
 
and fell again, tried and sentenced. 
 
“Maybe,” I thought, my time up and done,
“I will love Paris in the spring time.”
 
I fell again. Again.
 
I found a bench in the park, 
wine red as roses, lived on olives,
a still life no one ever saw for me, 
where, like my angels, I am sometimes without shoes.
 
But even if the memory of me fades for you,
an over-exposed print, the ashes of a letter,
I’ll find some paint,
thieve gold leaf and belief from other stores,
and try to paint my love again. 

**

​Unhealthy Tendencies:  Sappho and Erinna at Mytilene
 
In the finished work, you grasp the girl mid-swoon, 
your strong cheek upon softer face, uncertain 
of her fate, desire pulling like the moon.
All moonlight, your arms envelop, a tidal curtain
rushes shifting sands of her receding dress.  Not one
of her arms reaches out for you—it seems one hand
instead now pulls her garnet draping down, prize won, 
or seeks to push yours off, eyes watchful of the land.
 
But why look at the hands, when it’s the knees that know?
They slide like sailboats on the watercolour gowns,
hers crashes on your thigh, sharp undertow
pushes your own knee towards her hidden down.
 
Adrift, your own face loses self in lust;
but her face looks at us and can’t know who to trust. 

The Mystery of Faith, by Simeon Solomon (England) 1870

Monstrance
 
Who sees a monster in a monstrance
when anyone else sees God?
 
Who sees the mystery of faith
when someone else sees something odd?
 
Monere is to warn
monstrum is an omen or a portent,
 
but monstrare is to show
and the monstrance is proof of content.
 
The critics saw the white and gold, 
the intense spirit of the composition.
 
The homophobes saw blue eyes
staring at a staff, a degradation.
 
He saw the symbol of an eye held fast 
on higher meaning.
 
I saw the way love’s mystery 
refused a moral cleaning.
 
By moral, I only mean the faith
of feeling God as father.
 
By monstrance, we mean 
the vision of the other.
 

Study for the Head of Sappho, by Simeon Solomon (England) 1862

Study for the Head of Sappho
 
Erotics are for galleries, for readers.
For Swinburne and Rossetti, it’s an antic, 
a way for Buchanan and his Fleshly School of Poetry 
to stare, read over and over, making sure 
the sin is there.
 
But studies have no obligation to any eye but 
the one who seeks to see the head as it is alone--
away from the sun rising, Donne’s saucy pedantic wretch,
this woman’s self, the silence of the night.
 
Away from the bigger scene, the sightlines soften,
instead of desire panting on a cheek, the mouth is gentle,
milk-fed mouth, eyes closed as if she is the one who will be kissed,
not pressing into flesh but floating, graphite light
on textured paper apart from watercolour skin.
Apart, the lips can speak instead of kiss,
not even dreaming of what they miss.
 
She is not sensual but separate, as if inhaling her own name,
the Sappho curling upwards, exhaled
by the snake-like signature of someone who senses
there’s more to one’s mystic soul than sex revealed.
 
Bryn Gribben

Bryn Gribben is a poet and essayist who left academia to write and explore antiques.  Her essay "Cabin" was nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize, and she was a finalist both for the 2021 Creative Nonfiction Porch Prize and the Peseroff Prize in poetry.  Bryn's first book, a musical memoir, Amplified Heart:  An Emotional Discography, was published by Otherwords Press in 2022. She lives in Seattle with two cats and a love song of a husband. She just finished her second manuscript, The Patron Saints of Stuff, a series of personal essays about working in an antiques mall.