Forgotten Ground Regained
The Translator, Working Late
Oh girl, I get you. Grief: the gulf of it.Those -ceare compounds. Uhtceare , for instance,where you lie limp ‧ in the earliest light,knowing nothing, numb with the miserablememory of a love ‧ that crumpled to malice.The story stumbles— I understand that.Maybe there are muffling ‧ layers of mythearthing you in. I’m aiming under,to mine that woe, the marrow of that wailing.
He ran, to start with. His reasons are a riddle,a fumble. You followed, flogged by the gossipof þæs monnes magas: his people, mewlingrumors (oh honey, I can hear their whispershiss through the aeons), hammering the wedgethat split you, spitting ‧ suspicions. What were they,those muttered evils? Whose feuds? Whose hatred?
Your wrung-out spirit ‧ can’t spell it simply;
it dumps torn details ‧ in disarray.(Girl, I get you. I know how it goes:in the throes of suffering ‧ you lose the thread.)The first forevers, the fervent pledgethat nothing can part you ‧ nemne deað ana ,and then the lurch, the lunge into horror.His mouth, smiling, but morþor on his mind.
And now where are you? Nothing’s straightforward,except that you’re wretched. Are you sleeping rough?In a cave? Confined ‧ in a kind of convent,as Raffel tells it? Or railing from the tomb?Your pain alone ‧ is pure; it has paintedeven the landscape ‧ as loathesome, hostile.It scratches at memory ‧ like a wound’s scab.
I’m torn. I’m trapped ‧ in a scholarly tanglethat jumbles Germanic ‧ with jarring folktales.The one clear sound ‧ is your sorrow, clawingthrough stories buried ‧ in this barrow of song,with too many clues ‧ in its clot of consonants.
It’s three a.m. My brain’s throttledwith its own griefs; its gears have groundto a stall tonight. But this much I’ll stick with:I’ll never hold ‧ that you ended with “wisdom,”with gnomic mouthings ‧ on mankind’s lot,because I get it: how sadness gathersto a cry. And curdles. And turns to a curse.
Copyright © Maryann Corbett, 2024
First published in Forgotten Ground Regained: A Journal of Alliterative Verse, New Series, Issue 4, Fall, 2024
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