Tell us the instructions
Give us the list of commands
The steps we need to follow.
It would be so much eaiser
Than this wandering path of life.
We hack our way through the weeds
Foot by foot
Unable to see farther than directly in front.
We long for someone to paint a trailblaze for us
To signal where to go and what to do.
We feel like we will never arrive anywhere
But of course
There we are
Somewhere
Doing something.

This is my favorite misunderstood Shakespeare word.
Because it has “where” in it and because
We think a woman on a balcony should be
Searching for her man, we think it is a fancy form of “where.”
If you tried to understand the two words in wherefore, you wouldn’t
Get to “why.” This same thing happened to me
While I was living in Italy. My Italian
Was improving, I was starting to be able to understand
Basic questions and could figure out how
To understand the bigger ones. Then someone
Asked me, “Come mai. . .”
Several people began questions with “Come mai” and while
I understood all the words that followed “come mai”
And “come” and “mai,” I was completely flummoxed
By “Come mai.” It translates literally as “How never.”
I was struggling with sentences like
“How never are you in Italy?”
“How never did you choose Florence?”
“How never are you looking so confused?”
Once I got back to Italian class,
I asked for some help with this construction
And discovered that “Come mai” was simply “why.”

The ghost doesn’t answer.
Not yet.
The question is posed
Over and over
Rephrased, restated
But he won’t answer
Until he is alone with his son.
What would he say if he didn’t wait to speak?
“Go get Hamlet” or “I will speak to none but my son”
But nothing is more eloquent than saying
Nothing at all.

What thoughts are beyond the reaches of the soul?
What can we think that our souls cannot encompass?
Isn’t the whole idea of a soul that it should be infinite?
That it should reach to eternity? Both backward and forward, the soul
Extends in all directions
But a dead body in armor sees the moon
And even the soul loses its elasticity.

I was resting quietly.
The ceremonies over.
The royal corpse, draped in riches, covered in tapestries and fine cloth was resting in my belly.

I thought, “That could not have gone better!”

I’ve heard stories of sepulchres
Filled up with snot nosed half-noblemen or dingy knights.
My friend down the alley had a bishop in his belly
That was so filled with ulcerous secrets that the marble around him started to crack.
I thought I’d gotten so lucky.
I sat peacefully content to be digesting such a magnificent morsel –
The choicest of cuts,
The king!

I had a few weeks as the celebrity of the cemetery.
Everyone was deferring to me and I had a sort of
Self satisfied smile on my face at all times.
Then one day, about a week ago,
My belly started rumbling. Something
Was turning around in there and it wasn’t the worms.
It was kicking and failing. I was burping up little bubbles of distasteful decay,
Until one day, the roiling in my innards became such
That everything from my belly rose
Into my gorge and before I knew what was happening,
King and contents were on the ground before me
With my jaws sealed up tight again
As if nothing had happened.

The image of a kingly skeleton
Breaking out of its tomb is so
Perfectly Halloween.
It makes me want to see the Ghost
As only bones
To see his hip joints rolling in his sockets
As he walks his martial walk
Along the battlements.
Despite the fact that the ghost has expressions –
That he looks angrily or offended or frowns,
I somehow want just his bones
For his bones to frown
For his body to rattle
To see his ribs as he breathes,
To watch his spine shift when he turns his head
To see his jawbone wave as he speaks, which he will, shortly.

Like with a hot air balloon,
It fires up the air
Growing it bigger and bigger
Stretching the seams with not knowing
Pulling at the threads holding it together
Popping the stitches one by one
With the absence of knowing.
I have felt this swelling of ignorance
Longed for it to stop,
The hunger for answers
Pushing at the very bounds of my body,
But I love the wanting
The thirst to know things
The overwhelming curiosity,
It has driven me to places beyond the frontiers
Beyond the bounds
Beyond beyond.

When I copied out this speech, I stopped here.
Before I looked at the text again, I wondered
“Is it here? Does he answer?”
When barreling through lines and lines of text,
It’s easy to miss the spaces and the real questions.
If Hamlet waits here for the answer, we all wait. The silence in this scene is rarely played. It is thunder and fog, earthquakes and screeches but the sound of something not replying – of something that lives a question hanging in the air like an icicle –
That is real drama.

The verse seems to indicate these titles as all one thing –
A long list of identities to conjure a kingly father.
I want to punctuate it differently. Fuck up the verse.
I’ll call thee.
Hamlet!
King?
Father!
Royal Dane!
As David Ball points out in Backwards and Forwards, if these are each legitimate attempts to illicit speech from the ghost, the anticipation for what the ghost will say when it speaks grows with each word, with each silence.
As one sentence, it is a spell,
A conjuration, a strange artificial form of speech.
“Emily, Artist, Lover, American” would be a weird way to call me. And to be sure, I don’t have the titles a king of Denmark would
But even a king wouldn’t respond to this as an odd list.
And he doesn’t.