Looking at the Limb-loosener: Between Image and Word

Roxana Ghita over at the floating bridge of dreams posts a gorgeous photographic expression of the “limb-loosener”, drawing in part on my own thoughts of Sappho’s erotic figure. She seems to specialize in the transposition of photography and poetry, and the site is haunting,  and the poem there by Amy Lowell called to mind another Sappho fragment, number 2, of which I include a lexically highly experimental translation.

…there, water cold-soul’d was ringing through braids

of apple-wool, as with roses, the whole child-place

had cast shadows, and from the shimmering of leaves

a coma was pouring down.

What is elegant about her image (and it is set askew by my cropping) is that the overt sensuality of the gaze, the hair, is captured by its frame. Not the border of the photograph, its frame. This is the marvelous thing about the internet. A single strain of thought encounters an image at a cross-section, and the duplication produces a marking, indulable transverse change of direction, beyond the imagination of each. This, not to mention, that 2,500 years lives suddeny compressed into a relative instant.

I want to say, do peer as well (…the way my eyes squint when I look at some of these condensations), into her the beautiful fullishness of things. And the visually fragile however fallible. Something quakes.