“His chief fault was an inability to remember names and faces.”

 

The sea is faceless to the clouds
blurring white the horizon as
nesting spiders you’re grasping in handfuls
spilling like droplets with legs

for a YouTube video. Fulk, also
Fulco, Foulque etc. king of
Jerusalem, you imagine, stares back

across the blinding envelope
over the whitewashed sand-
-stone walls sailing him
to his holy kingdom, his taxonomy
of frontiers:   the waves you

see battering the walls with Wikipedia
articles: Liopleurodon: the apex
predator of the Middle to Late
Jurassic seas that covered
Eurasia.

The seabed must be a whole

continent of teeth, sown
over sunken baronies, Fulk might have said
to Fulkself. Under Fulk, the crusader
state of Jerusalem reached its
largest territorial extent. It’s

unsure between the Facebook group
Cool Freaks Wikipedia club,  

or William of Tyre
          —  noting
                of Fulk’s death

“and his brains gushed

forth from both ears and nostrils”
as well that “He never attempted to take
the initiative, even in trivial matters
without (his queen’s) consent” — who recorded

his face blindness.

Ibn-al Qalanisi

christening him al-Kind Anju— a transliteration
of The Count of Anjou— a renunciation

 

necessary to become wholly oneself,

noted “he was
not sound in his judgment nor was he
successful in his administration.”

 

 The Zengids
continued their march on the crusader states
culminating in the fall of the county
of Edessa in 1144, leading
to the Second Crusade.