You Burn Me.That we can be here…and still find things to call beautiful and to love or to be unable to stop loving is indefensible. But we are here, and we do. —Anahid Nersessian, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s DiscourseOceanic waters are “drenched in sperm and tears” as “Sea Foam”—one of 27 pensive, playful texts in Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leuco (1947)—begins. How boring, remarks Sappho to a nearby nymph. Both Britomartis and Sappho threw themselves into these salty, sticky waves out of desperation—to escape lecherous men, to obliterate a broken heart—and the poet, for her part, is disappointed. She longed after a sea that would swallow, that would annul. She longed for death. Swimming through the fluids of desire and despair forever was not at all what she had in mind. Cheer up, urges Britomartis. Becoming “a curl of frothing wave” is a fine fate.