Taliesin (for Dave German)

In Memory of Dave German / Match Point Tennis Club

The main thing to account in remembering the dead is the mask we hang to honor them, the memory ledge on the heart. Three hundred had fallen of "bright Gwynedd's horde," it says, "Bright battalions with their blue bright swords." Among these warriors, three "returned from the battle's rage," the singer recalled, but "I who was bleeding to sing this song," is not numbered or named. Llyfr Taliesin, Book of Taliesin of the fourteenth century, pictures its agonies in threes, of war, the love of woman, the worship of God. Heroes are measured in epithets. No incident is completely described. Descriptions of battle are heightened with fusion from true poems, "kindled" eulogies of an oral history unknown. No source is given that encourages the mask. It sounds like our own lives when the editor of the Facsimile (1910), J. Gwenogbryn Evans, describes the text and says none has suffered like Taliesin: "hundreds of lines have been marred in transcription. Syllables, words, clauses, sentences, lines have been dropped, prefixes, endings, and catchwords repeated or substituted for the original phrasing." In later celebration, many and more mysterious poems were added to the elegies of 600 AD, so these poetic translations too have a last word. Taliesin Poems (1982) wakes to news of Dave's passing with a change of birth. "The Branch" must now read, "When the Lord of all descended into death...then we were enabled to receive him."