Robin Durnford - Reply to a Footnote

From the 1997 Norton Critical Edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “Donelson’s thick Scottish dialect is the last obfuscating language we will hear. Like Mr. Swales’s impenetrable Yorkshire speech, it is ostensibly British” (301). ¹

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¹ Obfuscating , you say, to devils like me
                who reads you?

His accent unholy as vampires
contaminating your virginal Holy Words

But, “this devil is more clever than he is thought by some”
                says Van Helsing

biting into opacity
                feeding off blaspheming throats
                bleeding obliquely, melodiously
                unfolding in clownish infidelity
                to the sacred script of your unassailable tongues.

Scroll the passage: scrawls of agitations, hyphenations, apostrophes,
                atrophied words and signs,
subtitles on the page (for those who can only read) parentheses
translations or you — footnote.

He is impenetrable, you say, un-analyzable

says, “it’s no canny to run frae London to the Black Sea we’ a wind ahint ye, as though the Deil himself were blawin’ on yer sail for his ain purpose”

but as a voice
don’t you hear it?
Even a note

of pinched gyrations of your untainted tongue,
your tidy obfuscations,
bewilder and betray
                Someone.