After Sappho

by Selby Wynn Schwartz

In dry voices they went on about the aorist tense, while inside ourselves we felt the leaves of trees shivering in the light, everything dappled, everything trembling.

The genitive is a case of relations between nouns. Often the genitive is defined as possession, as if the only way one noun could be with another were to own it, greedily. But in fact there is also the genitive of remembering, where one noun is always thinking of another, refusing to forget her.

She chose the name Reseda because it reminded her of recita, a verb for actresses: it means, she plays her role, she recites her part.