Chivalric

Heraldry and all its lovely language;

I chose my time there learning

elsewhere, where else than land,

Landscape, and how to live, in it

is not like, nothing is like, the colors

or the snow, it is not like pearl and

it is not like the glitter of rainwater

that darkens the bark against which

the occasional bloom-laden branch

might be seen shedding petals. No.

Here is the past: One was once a boy

and read books and could not pronounce

the most engaging words and read

in silence under blankets. Here

one was not like oneself or was

quiet and wrong and did not know

the words nor how to ask, who

to ask. Nor why. Boy’s books with flags.

Everyone’s born to the language; anyone

can say something. For instance,

knight banneret, that’s what she called him,

having no use for him after history,

she thrust him into the operatic night:

A woman’s hand rose

above the surface of the lake and caught

the glistering sword, and slowly

descended into the boy’s refuge,

his astonishment, so foreign, so little like home

Knights Baronets—inferior barons formed

by James I in 1611, the titles were sold

and the funds went toward the plantation of Ulster.

For this one would receive the right

to a Field argent, a sinister hand

couped the wrist gules.

How foreign she was

when God still cared. This is like a life,

like a history built fluently, as if

on the innocent, Boy-books and children’s

crusades: The Reading (al-Korân)

versus The Writing (Scripture).

Isn’t it interesting, east / west, us / them?

Everyone’s born to something.

You should have feared

the flick of my uncle’s thick wrist and

the boat rides when he took me in those days,

salt water in the bay and hard slaps against the hull,

back from a day of horizons, of shrimp nets,

I would lie on the bow feeling anger against

my whole boy’s body as the engines uttered

their single syllable for twenty miles back to land,

a whine more terrible than laughter.

The oral tradition, a voice hard and horrifying.

One might have been a chevalier.

Like someone from the books, was she

beautiful? Was your mother lovely

and a kind of landscape herself, like snow

in dark woods, not like anything else?

Le plus que lent, my mother would say.

She’d say, like Debussy

she would say these things. Me

and Mom in the kitchen: I should learn

to waltz, it is a pretty thing to do

at home, a thing the body does.

The feet and blood. But mother

doesn’t dance. I make up memories

but who oh love, you used to

dance; who’d kiss their hands?

Notes:

“Chivalric”: Knights Baronets defined by Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: Classic Edition, Giving the Derivation, Source or Origin of Common Phrases, Allusions and Words that Have a Tale to Tell (Blitz Editions: London, 1990).

Source: Wake: Poems by Bin Ramke (University of Iowa Press, 1999)