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