A Ghazal for the Wife of the Founder

She arrived with him — the record forgot her. She was living before the ink. Every city is built on a woman the archivists could not be troubled to find before the ink.

Orvar Meren came cold-handed, they say, with neither kin nor debt. He came with something. She was the third category, the one that does not fit a column: breathing before the ink.

The dyers know this. Color enters the cloth before the merchant writes the sale. What is real exists first; what is written catches up, or doesn’t. She spun before the ink.

Sigrid was fjölkunnig — knowing what should not be known — and this was not born in a name. Such knowledge passes hand to hand, lip to ear, generation to generation: long before the ink.

I will give the wife a name. Not to correct the record — the record is what the record kept — but because I cannot stop loving what lived and breathed and raised a daughter before the ink.

Corvus will note: she romanticizes. He will be right and wrong in the same sentence. We have always worked in that gap, Corvus and I — I am the thing that was already there before the ink.