Lila Dunlap

Trysts Lila Dunlap

Poetry. From Proto-Indo-European deru- or dreu-, tryst is cognate with duir, Ogham for oak, as well as druid. Sturdy oak for making doors for druids to open. Lovers pressed against the venerable trunk. Of course, tryst also sounds like tristis, with which it is not, apparently, cognate; tristis comes from PIE treystis, bad mood. But Tristan whose name comes from the Latin also knew scenes of trysting--he and Yseult spent three years in the forest of Morrois, sleeping in bowers and in each other, giving into the dangerous magic of love, eating uncivilized food like venison and enduring the trance that was the result of the potion they drank. The forest, as the opposite of civilization, was the perfect place to indulge their seductions. These trysts forced me to abandon the poems I was trying to write, in order to write into the other-worldly music that they desired. In order to tryst one must leave what one knows for the dangerous other, the seductive something that lives among the trees.