Anna Campbell, After Anne Carson, After Sappho, 2015
This pick – or plectrum, which the lyric poet Sappho is credited with inventing – is foil-stamped with a fragment of Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s Fragment 31, also known as the Poem of Jealousy, sourced from If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Vintage, 2003). Each pick is set into a laser-cut mount that still bears the tendriled smoke patterns of its production, pointing back to the burning energy that fueled the poem.
Moonlight Serenade playing from another room
Glenn Miller
The year is 1942, and there is a war.
Not here, and not yet, but it’s the thought that weighs heavily on your minds. It threatens to disrupt the peaceful reprieve you have both managed to seek out from the party. Away from that crowded, smoky dance floor, and out into the gardens, where the evening is cool and fragrant. Everything is muted out here, softer, both sound and sight.
Alone together. One offers a hand, the other takes it, and you begin to dance.
For now, the idea of war is an ocean away. For now, you have the golden streams of light that spill out from the French windows, letting your shadows on the wet cobblestone stretch longer as you sway to a muffled tune.
Neither of you speak. The atmosphere is rich and dense with the delicate swell of instrumentals, the cloying scent of hyacinths, with the weight of words left unsaid. It’s a last dance. It’s a goodbye. But above all, it is a theft. Possibilities, moments in time, the growth of something more, all taken away by forces much larger than either of you.
Your eyes drift closed, and everything fades to the back of your mind except for the person in front of you. Your awareness has narrowed down to a few sensations, cataloguing them in your mind and stashing them away for safe keeping. Hands clasped together, a soft cheek leaning on a wool-clad shoulder, a hushed sigh close to an ear. Hair being brushed back, the sweep of eyelashes over cheekbone, the reassuring warmth of another person.
Chest to chest, heart to heart. You wish that this dance would never end, continue like the constant, never changing cadence of the music. You wish that you could capture this moment in amber, moving neither forwards or backwards, only a gentle sway to a distant song.
But the year is 1942, and there is a war, and soon the music fades to silence.
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