On Reading Sappho’s Lyrics
Sunday morning
I trace each line of verse
with my index finger,
find myself
stopping to study the crescent
nail on its tip.
In this small bit lies
the DNA of my birth
parents, the untold stories
of ancestry,
that if decoded,
would allow narratives
to emerge, unravel, collide,
calling my years of authorship
into question.
Some histories
are better left buried
with no hope of resurrection,
origins as untraceable
as a missing scrap
of papyrus,
information less translatable
than a rune,
disguise taken a step farther
even than Cynewulf
his name hidden
from all but the astute reader,
his identity concealed almost as well
as in a small keratin c:
my textual body
my found fragment.[from
[from Spectral Forms]
* * *
From the poet-publisher’s Web site:
Ce Rosenow founded her first small press publishing company, North Lake Press, in 1990 and she co-edited its primary publication, Northwest Literary Forum, until 1997. She also co-founded Irving Street Press in 1996 and helped edit Portlandia Review of Books and a series of broadsides from the press before creating Mountains and Rivers Press in 2001.
Her original poetry, essays, translations, interviews, and book reviews have appeared in journals and anthologies in the U.S. and abroad. She is the author of five collections of poetry: The Backs of Angels (Tel-let Press), Even If (Tel-let Press), North Lake (Mountain Gate Press), Pacific (Mountain Gate Press) and A Year Longer (Longhouse Publishers). She is also one of the eight co-authors of Beyond Within: A Collection of Rengay (Sundog Press) and the co-editor with Bob Arnold of The Next One Thousand Years, Selected Poems of Cid Corman (Longhouse Publishers).