A story told this many times becomes the forest. No beginning, no end, no longer a narrative but the air we breathe. For centuries, a woman with a name rises from her sleep—becomes a tree—rains back down again into her rest. One myth for how poetry began: a man, reaching. Violence. Myth: Apollo finds the tree inside of a woman. Apollo translates fingers into leaves, hears a voice and calls it wind. I am not interested in Apollo. I am interested in the father-god who could not stop the rape but could turn his daughter into a tree—
what kind of power is that, and how does it still river through our world? Why does nobody ask these questions? I carry more keys than I need. Walking home from the library late, I thread silver teeth through my fist. I am not a tree, and I am asking.
"Without her side of the correspondence, it is impossible to know why Hale loved Eliot—or what her love looked like. Hale’s voice comes to us only in whispers—heard, or half-heard, between the lines of Eliot’s poems, in the rustling leaves of the archive."
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“'The Meteor' starts in the far past, with a blackout: 'tutto annerò.' Annerò—that’s the past remote, a tense that doesn't exist in English. It indicates a past so far past that the present can’t touch it. But Pascoli means to infiltrate, undermine it—which is part of what compels me about the poem. It’s what compels me about translation, too: this vibrant failure of equivalence that brings the past into the present and present into the past."
