(In which I reconsider my chosen field of study.)
Tracking the life of a
feminine troubadour’s
filled with frustrations and
questions because,
owing to gaps in her
pseudobiography,
nobody’s certain which
woman she was,
plus, there's the pickle with
parsing Old Occitan
(or, for the oldfangled,
Old Provençal)—
sheesh. It's a showdown, a
phonosyntactical
Middle-High Noon at the
O.K. Corral!
Nobody told me when
tempting me into these
medievalia
how I’d be vexed:
Faux-medieval was
so much less troublesome,
everyone royal and
heavily sexed,
Gaming and Throning, their
bosoms all heaving so
hyperpneumatically!
Can't I just sink
swooningly back to his-
torical fantasy,
rapt and absolved of the
duty to think?
Nope. Even novelists
grub in the primary
sources for detail. There's
too much to know,
hang it. And that is the
trouble with Art, unlike
Life, where I'm making it
up as I go.