In the midst of Mary Di Michele’s poems about the youthful love interests of Pier Paolo Pasolini, one comes across a set of lines, attached by punctuation to what precedes and what follows, yet by the grace of spacing forming a unit unto itself.
listening to silence.
That moon, I said, used to shine
on Sappho’s shoulders,
Note the pause induced by the period after silence. And the running on hinted by the comma after the mention of shoulders. What is also remarkable is that the connectedness through the continuity of the shinning moon is achieved by a speech act. The connection with the past passes through words and the images they conjure. A tad ironic to find such a passage in a book entitled The Flower of Youth.
And so for day 799
19.02.2009