Bones to Ashes

I thought about it. “No idea.”

“Most people haven’t a word for it. Or if they do, it’s a local one. County strip. Median strip.”

“Devil strip,” I guessed.

“But only in Akron. Not even in Toledo or Columbus. But no one’s aware. Who ever talks about devil strips? You still with me?”

“Yes.”

“So language varies by educational level and geographical region. You can also throw in age, gender, social group, and just about every other demographic feature imaginable.”

“Language demonstrates what group you belong to.”

“You’ve got it. So the first thing I tried with your poems was linguistic demographic profiling. What does the language tell about the writer? Then I used microanalytic techniques to discern in each set of poems an individualized language pattern, what we call an idiolect. Based on all this, I was able to do the authorship analysis you requested, and answer the question: Did the same person write both sets of poetry?”

“Did she?”

“Let me go on. This analysis was especially interesting, since the K poems were composed by a French native speaker writing in English. As any foreign language teacher knows, you try to speak a second language using the linguistic system you already know, your native tongue. Until you get good, your native language bleeds through into your acquired one.”

I thought of my own use of French. “That’s why we have accents. And funny sentence structure. And word choice.”

“Exactly. For your analysis, as I worked through all the poems, when I spotted interesting passages, I put them up for split-screen comparison. On one side, I placed the poems as they are. On the other side, I altered the poems to reflect what a French speaker may have been trying to communicate in English, but failing because she was incorrectly translating from French, her first language, and using false cognates. If the overall coherence of the poem improved due to my changes, I took that as evidence the writer was perhaps Francophone. Do you want me to take you through some examples?”

“Bottom line.”

“It’s pretty obvious that both the K and Q poems were written by a native French speaker with limited formal schooling in English.”

I felt a hum of excitement.

“Next, I looked for idiosyncratic rhetorical devices common to both the K and the Q poetry, and any statistically significant skewing of vocabulary or grammar. You with me?”

“So far.”

“Listen to these lines from a K poem:

“Late in the morning I’m walking in sunshine, awake and aware like

I have not been before. A warm glow envelops me and tells all around,

‘Now I am love!’ I can laugh at the univers for he is all mine.”

The words rising from my past caused a constriction in my chest. I let Rob go on.

“Now listen to these lines from a Q poem:

“Lost in the univers, hiding in shadow, the woman, once young, looks

Into the mirror and watches young bones returning to dust.

“In both the K and the Q, the author meters in dactylic hexameter.”

“The same device Longfellow used for ‘Evangeline.’ My friend loved that poem.”

“Dactylic hexameter is common in epic poetry. So in itself the similar metering is not particularly meaningful. But of great interest is that throughout these two K and Q samples, similar mistakes appear consistently. And throughout both, the word ‘universe’ lacks the final e.”

“Univers. The French spelling.”

“Oui. Now let’s go back to geography. Your friend was Acadian from New Brunswick. She spent time in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Listen to the title poem from the Q book, Bones to Ashes.”

“What am I listening for?”

“Regional dialect. This Q poem contains the motherlode.”

Rob read slowly.

“Laughing, three maidens walk carelessly, making their way to the river.

Hiding behind a great hemlock, one smiles as others pass unknowing

Then with a jump and a cry and a laugh and a hug the girls put their

Surprise behind them. The party moves on through the forest primeval

In a bright summer they think lasts forever. But not the one ailing.