The recovery of Sappho was a boon limp sails tensed men were dragged behind like wreckage being cleared had pathetic things to say a stump for a voice dismembered phrases hobbled the ugly sound of the dead settling in To me he seemed impenetrable, hard, but no colossus, an embarrassment to his kind, inglorious, this man, whose head bled upon the sheet, he read aloud the Greek with ease, you’d think he lingered from another age, he spoke as if Sappho wasn’t scantily clad, made up, dismayed, her body a fragment sooth the ulcerated surface, the point where he stopped, it came apart, all at once amounted to what, unretained, let it, into the flood