“You burn me” was a sufficient primer into defining what poetry could be that I didn’t even want to venture too much further ahead. The thirty-eight fragment, written — probably — as something longer by Sappho 2,500 years earlier, drifted like a chipped coating of paint from a vase until it lodged between my years before spring break in the junior year of college, the only line I can still unequivocally remember, the smallest individual atomic compound of blank verse that wrung itself through the filter of history, translated from some other language.
I had thought to raise my hand in the lecture hall and make a comment, about how history itself (but really the passage of time) had been the final author, ultimately.
