soft fall

how strange !
today was a marvellous autumn day high up in my Vosges mountains...I went up looking down at the lakes a little further down and sat among the blueberry plants, opened the book I took with me.
Roland Barthes' essay entitled Fragments d'un discours amoureux...
An in that book , there was a quote of Sappho's about languid desire...here it is in French :
"...car dès que je t'aperçois un instant,il ne m'est plus possible d'articuler une parole : mais ma langue se brise, et, sous ma peau, soudain se glisse un feu subtil : mes yeux sont sans regard, mes oreilles bourdonnent, la sueur ruisselle de mon corps, un frisson me saisit toute ; je deviens plus verte que l'herbe, et, peu s'en faut , je me sens mourir "

" because as soon as I see you ,it is no longer possible for me to articulate a word: but my language breaks, and, under my skin, suddenly a subtle fire slides: my eyes are without sight, my ears hum, sweat streams on my body, a shiver runs right through me; I become more green than the grass, and, needing little, I feel dying "

... is the best I can do ... wow! ... what a feeling ... at once familiar and strange.

heres another note (www.turksheadreview.com/library/texts/barthes-loversdiscourse-notes.html) I found on this text by Barthes, one that struck me just now:

"In the loving calm of your arms"

étreinte / embrace

The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being.

... I know the feeling, although the clinical description is not in my spirit.

What a joy to wander in the hills with a good book and a beautiful soul.

... and here is a proper modern English translation:

31

That man to me seems equal to the gods,

the man who sits opposite you

and close by listens

to your sweet voice



5 and your enticing laughter—

that indeed has stirred up the heart in my breast.

For whenever I look at you even briefly

I can no longer say a single thing,



but my tongue is frozen in silence;

10 instantly a delicate flame runs beneath my skin;

with my eyes I see nothing;

my ears make a whirring noise.



A cold sweat covers me,

trembling seizes my body,

15 and I am greener than grass.

Lacking but little of death do I seem.



www.uh.edu/~cldue/texts/sappho.html

just extraordinary to be able to dialogue that way..as if you just took out a book out of your library , to go on reading the poem I have begun . Magic web.I'll mark the links you've noted...so interesting.
I send you my afternoon place where I read Barthes