I Know I Must Have Lived Before For No One Today Could Have Instructed Me Like This Any More

Oh, to summon is not to summarize,
she said, sensing the unsaid with a smile.
And do you know that with the Renaissance
we gave men a new sense for fingers’ touch—

by letting it mean “to play a musical instrument”
as well as “to take something thievishly”?
And why, you ask? Latin fingere—
to touch was to devise—and to touch,

we knew too well, was to shift and alter.
Even though hardly but the very few,
and perhaps not even the poets,
could suspect that fingere

is kin to faint—to swoon,
to lose possession of oneself—
that which fails to be musical
and does not know the play.

And what is more—the etymos
or eteos—the true and original root
in all this is dheigh-—to form,
though first to knead,

to lift and ferment bread into shape;
and from one single etymon
came a well-arrayed host:
fingere, as I have glossed,

feindre—to hesitate—and feint,
to make a pretended blow,
but also figure, lady, paradise,
and to feign—to conceal.

So all these are thus
dæges or diges—
makers and poets
of what may be made to rise,

just like their kindred,
τοῖχος—not only a wall,
but the snug side of the ship.