Poet's Choice

Fire

It was midafternoon when I saw Alexis

loitering in the marketplace, the late-

season harvest of fruits and vegetables

heaped in panniers and wooden tubs.

And while the world seemed all of overfill,

standing out in that shadeless square

I got burned twice, once by the sun

and once by the way he glanced at me.

Even so, the dark was little comfort

when it finally came, for though the sun

was safely laid to rest, my dreams

refreshed the lifelong memory of that scald

across my cheek, the elemental mark

that burns from appetite and carnal fire.

Much later than Meleager, long before Sherod Santos, the European conventions of the sonnet form described love as burning, contracted from the painful, sudden enchantment of a glance. By arranging his translation, quite anachronistically, in the 14-line pattern of a sonnet, Santos calls attention to the underground streams that connect any reader to this ancient, yet immediate, sunlit scene.

(Sherod Santos's translations of the poems "Fire," by Meleager, and "Hypnos," by Alcman, are from his book "Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation." Norton. Copyright © 2005 by Sherod Santos.)