Because of her reversal, because she lets Apollo count her sand and refuses only later, the sun is sibyl’s province, the whet belt of her inner eye. Her voice is always sun. She reads us not by moon, moonfaced female moon, but Hathor’s golden bowl. From within her slanting cave, sun is her one object, her source of blind desire.
The sibyl’s generosity is compersive, her speech a wanton stewardship. She schools us from the sealed roundel of what, at lightyears’ distance, gleams. They will always brand her neutral, as one who yearns not, longs not, exists as, Is. For she shows them only the As Is, the vaguest outcroppings, the twiggy bushels. Her dry luster, with its lacquered serenity, seems austere, a winterbourne. No, though, hers is an aridity, and beneath, full humus feeling. Cave comings, warrening pure heat. How else to explain, that, in truth, Apollo’s copulative promise smacked much too of ego, was too single pronoun, for a force already, solarly, contained.
In my teens, curled up on a radiator watching over a thicktopped park, I often imagined a man’s hand reaching up and through my own boughsome channel, the vaginal crevasse, all the way to the heart, to pull on the string of its lamp. I wanted to widen his passage. It widened with a woman’s hand. Actually, by several women’s hands. That is, I think, what we are to each other. Sibyls touching in effulgent, compassionate spatial abnegation. At the remove of our respective knowings, nymphologies alive and well in we of the modern naked city.
