Song of Eleven Consonants and Thirteen Vowels, for G. Stein
- Song of Eleven Consonants and Thirteen Vowels, for G. Stein
wode: From Middle English wode, from Old English wōd (“mad, raging, enraged, insane, senseless, blasphemous”), from Proto-Germanic *wōdaz (compare Middle Dutch woet > Dutch woede, Old High German wuot > German Wut (“fury”), Old Norse óðr, Gothic (woþs, “demonically possessed”), Old Irish fáith (“seer”), Welsh gwawd (“song”)).
Adjective
ºwode (comparative woder, superlative wodest)
(archaic) mad, crazy, insane, possessed, rabid, furious, frantic.
And would’ve you passed the
Would your past
Would you your past?
Would the
(your or the?)
Gert?
And would—or wode?
And would you pass thew?1 What’s past thew but thewer?
Would your past sew depth?
A word net.
Your thew—Gert—worded,
woder than the past.
Any of your words: any [End Page 762]
thud or pad or woop you wrote was
woder than the past—but you
found the thew in wode—Gert—
in word.
katie farris is the author of boysgirls, a hybrid-form text. Her translations and original work have appeared in anthologies published by Penguin and Greywolf, and literary journals including Virginia Quarterly Review, Verse, Western Humanities Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. She is an associate professor at the MFA program at San Diego State University.
Footnotes
1. From Middle English thew, theaw (often in plural thewes), from Old English pēaw (“usage, custom, general practise of a community, mode of conduct, manner, practise, way, behaviour”). Cognate with Old Frisian thāw, Old Saxon thau (“custom”), possibly reflected in an Old High German *dou (“discipline, coercion, tuition”); West Germanic *þawwaz (“custom, habit”), of unknown etymology, by EWAhd tentatively identified as a reflex of an s-less variant of Proto-Indo-European (s)tāu- (s)te- “to stand, place”).
Noun
-
1. Muscle or sinew.
-
2. A good quality or habit; virtue. An attractive physical attribute, especially muscle; mental or moral vigour. [End Page 763]
