They’ve spent hundreds of years in this tavern
conjuring those better days, those uncouth
centuries, reviving the light beside dark paneled walls
of Petrarch’s “dark ages” over mead and grog, fidelity
oaths
sworn to mendicant sects and the Roman de la Rose,
as they chase the Magyars, Hussites and Cathars
with the Visigoth Laws, wielding pipe rolls and privy
purses,
Aethelbert writs, dooms of the North People, assizes
from shire reeves, these defenders of their Holy
Sepulcher
waved pewter chalices at the fiasco at Damascus, the
capture
of Constantinople, Barbarossa overreach, the imperial
precaria,
the outrage at Anagni, the Avignon papacy, the pragmatic
sanction,
the praise of folly,
the Age of Bede v. the Age of Alfred, Joan d’Arc
martyrology.
Roaming their eyes o’er vast fiefdoms and vassalages,
handing down coin of tithes and indulgences,
they hoist pints in praise of bald men,
Charles the Fat and Peter the Hermit,
Theodoric, Gologras and Gawain,
proclaiming bulls of approbation straight out of the Inquisitor’s
Manual,
proscribing the ordeal of boiling water for Abelard’s
cabbage and ham,
reciting the Booke of Margery Kempe, the Condemnation of
Wycliffe
and Wycliffe’s Reply,
re-discovering the head of John the Baptist in a stall,
the
perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary in a fungi.
Did laws precede kings, Islam precede Christianity,
individuality predate serfdom, freedom predate property?
They scavenged in slippery bicker treasures already mined
by the likes of the Nazarenes, Pre-Raphaelites, Prosper
Merimee,
for the secrets of nations, the legends in their blood,
the roots of local rivalries, the truth in modern stories
of tournaments and plagues, saints and ladies, wizards and
fools,
jacks and kings —
Arden, Maitland, Duhem, Lapesa, Kibansky, Le Goff,
Duby, Ganshof, Lucien Febvre, Schlabach, MacIntyre, Cabell,
Bloch,
Bedier, Pidal, Braudel, Ladurie,
Lewis, Moore, Pirenne, Sesini,
Tolkien, Gilson, Schramm, Kantorowitz —
their names are like the deerheads on the walls.
Their grandchildren play with virtual dragons and swords
and the youngest crave gargoyles and darkness still
but no one remembers what this legion of men once said,
the arguments never resolved, of a past no one knew,
the
one they invented
before the hangover dawns.
