A Tale of Courtly Romance

Welcome to Etcha. I’m Ben, and today we are going to answer the question, “How can you tell if you are in a courtly romance?”

Here is how I imagined things went in the twelfth century: between the arduous duties of counting coppers, attending tournaments, waging wars, and beheading criminals, the Lords and Ladies and other various courtiers would lounge about their court regaling each other with tales of love, romance, danger, and daring. And among these esteemed storytellers was a woman named Marie de France, the first woman of her time to have written successfully in the vernacular.

Now who exactly Marie de France was is up for debate. Was she Marie, the eighth Norman child of Waleran de Muelan? Marie, abbess of Shaftsbury? Mary, abbess of Reading?

Whomever she was, this woman brought us one of the most esteemed collections of courtly romances of the early Medieval ages, The Lais of Marie de France.

Twelve stories grace this collection, but what better story to answer our question of Courtly Love than the story of a knight in King Arthur’s court?

To hear the story of Lanval, click the link above.

Dream State ft. Continuum: A poem after Jorie Graham

Continuum

After Jorie Graham

 

Mid-slumber. Dream of. I want you mimes my dream. Want me, want

you. I stare out. Want the coupling of us

mimes the fragile waters, technicolor blue, dry. Plus

the merging, which tends to separate more than it couples.

Plus, in the mirrors, the reflection of you, vivisecting in and down,

infinitely,

or so it seems, glass roads on silvered skies, & mighty pictures of ideas slither so quickly

down the spinal chord into and through

to fingers free—

& you ask me to dance alongside your sparkling tune, & curves so graceful I want to die,

but can’t emerge until

the rising sssss…

but no orb glares on this horizon, just clashing waves of grey and brown,

that sometimes cover sepia islands burst forth mind lava

from memories cut and dried and rearranged—candy

cottony solids—from the forth dimensional fields between

synapses—

They fry, not fire, but fry in the dancing flames of ice that lick my meta-subconscious

where I squeeze between poriferous volumes

& glean spotty words that split into halved pictures of time previous,

of have not beens

which live inexorably between the grey&illustrious mind     

cubicles of daily reality

conglomerated in conjunction with fantasy&fiction

&science&fiction pulp soup compressed into pages where soot&fat

boil together; I flip them—each one an author’s mind sliced

—slide under microscope—

I look up. As I sit on sprouts of dust, the mood rabbit

trounces—away

I follow.

It’s green—blue—white

down the starry tunnel

into a sea of flesh eating eels where princesses are eaten daily, but I’m not a princess.

Teeth dissolve,

& you are there,

periwinkle blue flowers spotting summer dress over solar bronzed wheat,

chocolate curlicues,

manna flesh from heaven,

my skin, my eyes, my flesh, tastes all that you feel like, smells all that you sound like in the drowning summer air in a field of wildflowers

so vivid I could think them—

head down, soft lap of periwinkle blue,

fingers velvet,

dewy lips—aural sensation—slide along neck, shiver, smile, blink,

& awake to

a dream-washed face,

night curtain curls that fall askew over moon-kissed brow and star-singed cheeks,

around which the sun peeks.

& you, brown-eyed dream, lip-mime,

I want you; want me.

Ben Mattice ©湥 2009