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Obsoletus



Petrarch was among the first to use
The sonnet-form and also wrote in Latin
So elegantly correct and Ciceronian
It killed the tongue for daily use,
Confining it to the learned and then
To no one when the learned wished
To talk to everyone and a universal
Tongue meant universal ignorance
Of what was being said; the Latin mass
Called Tridentine, an adjective from
Trent where the Council met to publish it,
Is no longer used in churches but is missed
By those who recall its sonorous comforts;
But it survives because Sebastian Bach
And Mozart set it so sublimely that
We find it useful to know that Kyrie
Elieson is Greek for Lord, have mercy,
And Credo Latin for I believe which
We can sing though we no longer can.

We file what we no longer use,
Transmuting it to other tongues; sonnets
Jump from Petrarch’s Italian to demotic
English and a dozen tongues for those
With leisure for that sort of thing and
Ideal love is recalled if not experienced.
The griot reciting in Wolof made a hit
On 1970s television, and I hope the
Griots have their lore backed up on disks
By now, for genes and cultures merge to live.
The griot is welded to the sonnet form,
The sonnet to the griot’s mind and ours.

We must not forget the closet where we
Preserve the past, soon I shall teach
The use of a clutch and stick shift
To my granddaughter and mention to her
That my father told me that when the
Planetary low gear band was worn
On a Model T Ford you could still
Back up a steep hill with the fresh reverse;
His father did not stick around enough
To teach my father how to brake a heavy load
Down a steep slope with reluctant mules, so
That teaching is lost forever unless
Some great Champollion repairs that gap
In collective memory that we might need.

Once I stood in odd Lenin Park away
From traffic on the edge of Budapest
Among a jumble of mismatched statuary
No longer wanted by the present public but
Preserved in case the times should alter
By a city that history has made prudent;
The largest cast is the Russian soldier who
Used to hand the torch of liberty to
The Spirit of Hungary on Buda summit;
Only one small monument is vandalized,
The one to a Judas of 1956 who was not
Really needed, for the tanks rolled in anyhow
As Lukacs had warned: Lukacs, whose best
Writing was done in prison, who had been
A minister in the short-lived revolutionary
Regime of 1919 led by Bela Kun and
Organized the artists with actors led by
Bela Lugosi and musicians by Bela Bartok,
Whose exile works are universal.
The monuments to that brief interlude
Are not heroically muscled like the soldier
But sleekly art moderne, a style
I rather hope will be admired again.

I am full of it, the no longer in use,
The obsolete, derived from Latin obsoletus,
Past participle of the verb obsolescere,
And I intend to spend my last years
As long as a few gray cells are working,
Re-learning Latin and even learning Greek,
Like reactionary Cato and old Judge Holmes,
And even writing down what I was the last
Teacher in my last school to have
At the tips of my fingers about sixteen
Millimeter film projectors that once
Had to be hand-threaded: you unreeled
The opaque leader from the new top reel
Under a stay bar and a toothed wheel,
Then looping carefully into the slot
Behind the lenses, leaving a generous
Bottom loop, then around more sprockets
And slowly, tightly around the sound drum
And around two more steadying bars
To the empty slot on the bottom reel.
If print technology were not as old hat
As the subjunctive mood and poems, I
Could diagram it for you on a board
That I still recall as slate and black.

--J. Quinn Brisben 28 JUL 2003



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