fragments

I'm reading Anne Carson's Sappho translation If Not, Winter, and thinking about lost things. I'm thinking about my favorite swimsuit in 8th grade (my first two-piece), my first CD collection, the pictures on my memory card when I doused my old camera with coffee, my green wallet, and one stack of 4th period's character analysis essays (I know, I'm awful). None of these things would be on my mind if I still had access to them. They all shimmer with unique beauty because they have entered the realm of the never-to-be-recovered. For an absentminded type like me, that's a large realm.

My curiousity about Sappho was peaked when I studied e.e. cummings. In college, cummings was greatly influenced by the fragments and shaken syntax of Sappho. Here's a poem of hers:

]heart
]absolutely
]I can
]
]would be for me
]to shine in answer
]face
]
]having been stained
]

The open brackets indicate torn or rubbed away fragments of papyrus. Anne Carson, in this version, has taken what is legible and morphed that into a poem, of sorts.


Now here's one of cummings:

(but

true

to the incomparable

couch of death thy

rhythmic

lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

The way he forces whole thoughts into fragmentation is homage to her fragmented thoughts. This fragmentation is arguably what made him such a popular poet.

While it was a clear choice for Cummings, Sappho never meant for her writing to be broken apart. Yet it's taken on a life its own because of this loss. For example, this one:

]
]
]Atthis for you
]
]

That's all of it. There's nothing particularly magical about those words. It's the emptiness surrounding them that sings.

There is something really powerful in silence. The situations that still haunt you, in all probability, are the ones for which you still don't have clear answers.



What I leave out

the whole pieces

of nights when maybe it rained

I trained

memories to flake away

like cheap gilding

like that was all you weighed

so truth patches

beneath other things

even for me

what I want

is to find the scroll

where you keep me

in scratches and [

there is no reason

except

things erased

still

factor