Threshing the Word: Sappho and a Particle Physics of Language
...from Ploughshares
by Meredith Stricker
What if we could look at language as matter
[as real and outside our imagining as granite or cedar trees]
and move inside words, the way particle physicists break
into atoms with the force of their own energy and light?
To track the intelligent chaos of language by threshing
open the word,
olive pressed against stone
disappears into
its own
wet interior vowels in their syllables
wheat crushed white
as the almond in its green husk.
Delving into the fibers and roots of the word fragment
[Sappho’s emblem, her surviving] first unbinds
the alliterative echo of “fragrant”
[redolent of sunflower pollen,
basil on a white plate, a single dark
crimson rose]
floating free from a solid core of definition, from meaning
one thing alone as a river of other words is loosened
like sodium and chloride molecules
from the simple compound salt.
And we discover fragment arises from the Latin frangere
which comes from
bhreg: to break or breach - in French: brier or broyer:
to knead
[as in brioche - yeasty and warm in the morning as violets
bloom]
related to brak-:
undergrowth, bracken: “that which impedes motion”:
[ferny thickets, refuge of mallows and plover eggs,
shelter for the undomesticated: outcasts and resistance fighters.]
While break continues to fragment like a splintered, living shard
and no longer green, vine tangled growth, brak- becomes
braeke:
“a crushing instrument” : its own winnowing ring
threshing open a chorus of words fragmented from all hope
of referring singly and without complication
to the myriad tesserae of their sources:
FRACAS, FRACTED, FRACTION,
FRACTURE, FRAGILE, FRANGIBLE,
FRAIL, INFRACT, INFRINGE,
OSSIFRAGE
breaking bird>, REFRACT, SAXIFRAGE
<“rock breaking herb: small flowered with
rosette leaves”> and on to SUFFRAGARI (to
vote for: “to use a broken piece of tile as
a ballot>: SUFFRAGIUM: the right to vote.
It is not impossible to imagine Sappho grown pale and fierce
at a hunger strike in a circle of other women who will
not be swayed & as she speaks,
we can barely distinguish just under her voice, low and indistinct
the sound of threshing and threshing - the fragments
of fragment like a waterwheel of cicadas at dusk.
It’s not hard to locate Sappho at this overlay of electrons
swarming the throat
each fragment refusing the reduction by which it is defined -
opening instead into a welter of infinity
Sappho’s fragments [“first imagined 2,500 years ago”]
threshed by the “crushing instruments” of time and censors:
broken open but not broken
her own shards scatter like pollen into our lives
“- pointlike, indivisible particles from which the world around us
blossoms.”
This is how she keeps writing her way back to us
with an aching persistence
like the almost invisibly flowered saxifrage chiseling into rock
and the white-winged velocity of the osprey.
Copyright © Meredith Stricker
by Meredith Stricker
What if we could look at language as matter
[as real and outside our imagining as granite or cedar trees]
and move inside words, the way particle physicists break
into atoms with the force of their own energy and light?
To track the intelligent chaos of language by threshing
open the word,
olive pressed against stone
disappears into
its own
wet interior vowels in their syllables
wheat crushed white
as the almond in its green husk.
Delving into the fibers and roots of the word fragment
[Sappho’s emblem, her surviving] first unbinds
the alliterative echo of “fragrant”
[redolent of sunflower pollen,
basil on a white plate, a single dark
crimson rose]
floating free from a solid core of definition, from meaning
one thing alone as a river of other words is loosened
like sodium and chloride molecules
from the simple compound salt.
And we discover fragment arises from the Latin frangere
which comes from
bhreg: to break or breach - in French: brier or broyer:
to knead
[as in brioche - yeasty and warm in the morning as violets
bloom]
related to brak-:
undergrowth, bracken: “that which impedes motion”:
[ferny thickets, refuge of mallows and plover eggs,
shelter for the undomesticated: outcasts and resistance fighters.]
While break continues to fragment like a splintered, living shard
and no longer green, vine tangled growth, brak- becomes
braeke:
“a crushing instrument” : its own winnowing ring
threshing open a chorus of words fragmented from all hope
of referring singly and without complication
to the myriad tesserae of their sources:
FRACAS, FRACTED, FRACTION,
FRACTURE, FRAGILE, FRANGIBLE,
FRAIL, INFRACT, INFRINGE,
OSSIFRAGE
breaking bird>, REFRACT, SAXIFRAGE
<“rock breaking herb: small flowered with
rosette leaves”> and on to SUFFRAGARI (to
vote for: “to use a broken piece of tile as
a ballot>: SUFFRAGIUM: the right to vote.
It is not impossible to imagine Sappho grown pale and fierce
at a hunger strike in a circle of other women who will
not be swayed & as she speaks,
we can barely distinguish just under her voice, low and indistinct
the sound of threshing and threshing - the fragments
of fragment like a waterwheel of cicadas at dusk.
It’s not hard to locate Sappho at this overlay of electrons
swarming the throat
each fragment refusing the reduction by which it is defined -
opening instead into a welter of infinity
Sappho’s fragments [“first imagined 2,500 years ago”]
threshed by the “crushing instruments” of time and censors:
broken open but not broken
her own shards scatter like pollen into our lives
“- pointlike, indivisible particles from which the world around us
blossoms.”
This is how she keeps writing her way back to us
with an aching persistence
like the almost invisibly flowered saxifrage chiseling into rock
and the white-winged velocity of the osprey.
Copyright © Meredith Stricker