memory speaking in dactyls

I spent a lot of time thinking about this poem while we were in Greece, but I had so many poems I wanted to post while we were there that some of them had to get saved for later, and this is really more of a poem about Latin than about Greek. Luckily, I then missed a whole bunch of days, so here is an extra poem for April 15.

"…forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit…"

This is dactylic hexameter. This is the meter I learned about
back when I first studied Virgil, much longer ago than I'll tell you.
I tell of a lesson that failed; I sing of a student who stumbled.
"This, even this, one day, will be helpful for us to remember…."
That's what the poet said, anyway.

Think of a scratchy recording, a thirty-three rpm relic,
and under the scratches and crackles, a basso declaiming Evangeline:
"This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks"—
that was to show us the meter of Arma virumque cano—
and beating it out on the table,

the hand of an elderly teacher, her finger-joints lumped and arthritic.
Think of old Longfellow's poem, unread now for so many decades.
Think of old classrooms, old desks, old textbooks with fray-cornered covers.
Feel the great age of the Latin, and all this antiquity pressing
on us who were girls of sixteen.

Soothing old rhythms and sounds, but the road where they led me dead-ended.
English is different from Latin, and stresses are different from long-marks.
Scattered and careless, I fumbled the Latin idea of duration.
(Lord, how I cringe when I think of the ways I misscanned the Aeneid,
misunderstanding the sound of it.)

A wonder it happens at all, that young people learn from old epics.
So many ways of mishearing the rustle of papery voices.
Still, there are fragments that stick; we look for them later and find them.
"Tears of things": now that I've shed them, the line that most comes to me lately—
memory speaking in dactyls.

—Maryann Corbett, "A Meditation on Dactylic Hexameter." I am about 98% certain that I got this poem from the wonderful wintercreek, many moons ago, but I don't have any other publication information. Maryann Corbett is pretty cool, though.

pray for him that made this book

On a long oak table in a formal room
in the rare book department of the library
is the fifteenth-century manuscript—Middle English—
from which I mean to wring a dissertation.
The librarian, anxious for this precious object
left to my handling, offers me a bookweight.
I settle into the captain's chair and the task.

These first steps are detective work, forensics.
Hand: Anglicana; Secretary features.
Materials: paper. Visible watermarks.
Though faded, the pen strokes have the ebb and flow
of a bending quill tip in a moving hand.
The heavy paper still shows peaks and troughs
that speak to the moving pen. My own right hand,
knows pens and writing, and it feels these moves,
knows in its bones another hand was here.

I move on steadily, noting organization,
stories, verse forms, language variants,
marginal scribbles. I don't know how long
I've worked like this when I come to the colophon.
The words are, /Pray for him that made this book/.

It hits like a stone: Handwritten words on paper,
like any scrawl on spiral-bound, ripped out
and passed across the classroom, any note
on an envelope's back, left on the kitchen table,
and in my cradle-Catholic head, the prayer
has said itself before the doubt could speak.

It's only later, as I walk toward home,
plowing head down into the wind of spring,
that I picture a grave—somewhere near Hull, I think—
and wonder how long the bones of a hand would last.

—Maryann Corbett, "Hand," published in Strong Verse in 2008, and quite possibly elsewhere.