Notes on Sappho’s Midnight Fragment

Night falls with the languid slice of a knife in my mother’s kitchen, each hour cleaved from the tangled, writhing mass of time. She hums a melody beneath her breath. I shrug off my backpack and make no mention of the girls who called me queer at school. If the perfect tense of δέδυκε marks past action with an air of finality, what is the point in looking back?

If I ever find myself in a love poem, I might neglect to question the beauty that infects it—the streetlamp that blocks out the broken street, the mountain that perches atop the backs of laborers, the all-seeing eye of σελάννα that spies our bodies in the more affordable dark.

The sun slips down the hall, a blushing schoolgirl with secrets for days. Her red-hot desire that was my second skin has ตกแล้ว (fallen down); in Seattle, grayness imparts the sky with watchful stasis, while the Bangkok skyline is scrubbed white-gold through pixels.

The Πληΐαδες are seven sisters who are transformed (or reduced) to a cluster of stars by Zeus to comfort their father, the sky-carrying Atlas.

Splayed in the middle (μέσαι) of some invisible pain, I rise again.

In the Thai version of the Pleiades creation story, a hungry monk comes to collect alms from an elderly couple. They decide to give him their hen for dinner and all the sacrificial hen’s chicks leap into the fire after her. They are rebirthed into stars (กลุ่มดาวลูกไก่).

I skin the scales of my nights (νύκτες), grateful for hunger and the freedom to sate it.

There are other words (χρόνος, καιρός) for time (ὤρα), and never enough comfort of hours.

คืน means “night” as well as “return.” One day I may give you your nights back, though I won’t know how.

The “I” of ἔγω rings across generations of great men, tying us to the survival of scripture. The biblical declaration of self.

I learn to be alone (μόνα) when my room is caught in a web of winter, spinning words into indulgent machinery against loneliness.

I sleep (κατεύδω) with my back pinned to an imaginary faith, caught between myth and scripture.

The female personal pronoun ฉัน could also be used in occasions of romance, drama, lyric.

Alone (คนเดียว), I dangle a line down my throat for the best word to call home; in search of a vowel, I succumb to breath. Looking down at the water, my image is fractured by the hand of light. My lips are parted by a lone relic of my mother’s melody.