I remember the moment I realized that “flaws” were precious.
His arm was across my lap,
From the wrist to inner elbow, a scar, the flesh uneven.
I ran my finger over it, wondering –
Wondering, not what had happened but wondering at the wonder
Of a bump in the body being so beautiful.
Were my own imperfections beautiful somehow?
In my mind, I was full of angry scars
Nothing but mistakes.
But in loving his scar
I saw how I could love my own,
Imperfections mingling with the rest, making the totality of a person.
Author: erainbowd
‘A was a goodly king.
Once upon a time,
‘a sat upon his goodly throne
next to his goodly queen.
All his goodly people
Brought their goodly problems
To his goodly feet and he sent them
On their goodly way
Resolved or furious or dead.
This goodly king’s goodly face
Was printed on metal and passed
Throughout the goodly markets along the goodly streets
Exchanged for goodly goods and survivable services.
I saw him once.
This is a good story, really –
He was just in the grocery store
Like anyone else
Buying some crackers and baby food.
He was wearing sunglasses
Trying not to be seen.
He’d grown his beard out, too
So you could miss him
If you weren’t paying attention
But in my story
I saw him.
I was right there
Behind him in line.
I wanted to shout
“Look who it is! Look look!”
but it’s better as a secret
my own private moment with fame.
In my mind’s eye, Horatio.
Inside the skull,
Somewhere between layers of cartilage and lobes,
There is an eye.
It doesn’t see the way the other eyes see. It doesn’t take in an image, then turn it around
So that we might make sense of it.
Our outward eyes are easily fooled. There’s a blind spot or two and with the right glasses,
The world can be turned completely upside down.
In the scientific experiments with these glasses,
People saw the snow fall up
The grass growing overhead and everyone walking
On the ceiling
But as soon as they could touch the world
As soon as they could feel the snow falling on their palms
The world righted itself again – almost in an instant.
The mind’s eye, though, disconnected from the palm
Could watch the snow fall up for days if it wanted but then too
It could create dragons and pits of cotton candy and buildings made of cheese.
It may never turn the world right way up but it can see beyond seeing.
Where, my lord?
I love when this is played as a joke
Though I see why it mightn’t be.
When these two characters’ sense of where a dead person might be contradict each other – it’s this happy collision of the intellect with the supernatural.
Horatio quite literally just saw Hamlet’s dad.
In Hamlet’s experience, there’s no way to see his supernatural father anymore –
But somehow, I love a Horatio who reels around looking for a ghost.
Despite the fact that he is reported not to be passion’s slave
I love when he’s a little jumpy. After all, his entire world-view has just been up-ended.
Things that he held to be fantasy have walked right before him, chilled his very marrow.
If he looks to see what isn’t there,
He’s become who he wasn’t
He’s transformed by his experience in scene 1.
I like a play that is an ever widening gyre of transformation.
My father – methinks I see my father.
He’s sitting in that old yellow chair
Watching his child run wild
Across the carpet.
He is so comfortable there and bemused
To see so much chaos outside of himself.
I bring him, whole cloth to the wedding,
Watching events transpire that might
Bring up a weaker man’s stomach
The chaos and the shame
Spiral out in front of him
But I want him to rise and take up that sledded pole-ax
With which he smote upon the ice
And I want him to start swinging it.
Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven Or ever I had seen that day, Horatio.
Wouldn’t a Christian wish to see his enemy in heaven anyway?
Like, with forgiveness and all that stuff?
But I suppose it’s like having a nemesis follow you somewhere
Maybe become more successful
Like, if you’re swimmers and you meet at the Olympics
Except he wins the gold and you get the bronze and of all the people to encounter
in the pool, it had to be him. Damn it! He’s everywhere! And you hope, at least in death, you will be free of him
But then, there is he, already at the pearly gates
Wearing a designer halo
Handing out the wings.
The funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
And weren’t the guests gossiping!
“Did you see that slivered boar sandwich?
So clearly the same boar we ate at her husband’s funeral.
Can you imagine?
Are those the same shoes?
The ones with which she followed her husband’s corpse?
Did she just dye those things to match her wedding dress?
How gauche! How uncouth!”
”I don’t know – – – why waste a good boar?
He’s already been roasted and everything
Throw it on there with the rice
Who doesn’t love sliced wild boar?
I could eat it for days.”
Thrift, thrift, Horatio.
It’s an odd line of fame.
Maybe it’s due to its brevity and the sly
Accusation within it.
Thrift, on most occasions being an asset
But here, seems to imply an insensitive penny pinching
Or perhaps an alternate reality
Wherein the reasoning behind an oe’erhasty marriage
Has only to do with saving resources.
Perhaps it did
Perhaps there is no joke
No accusation
No parallel existence
Just a remarkable ability to take advantage of
Leftover meat.
Indeed my lord, it followed hard upon.
Yesterday, I was thinking of my father’s wedding
Remembering what it was to be 12 and watching domestic disaster strike
in stepwalk slow motion.
I thought, briefly, of the one session of therapy they sent me to
(“Why do I have to go to therapy? You’re the one with the problem!”)
Which made me realize that I didn’t know which came first
My father’s wedding or my mother’s moving in with her boyfriend, me in tow.
One followed the other so closely that my memory cannot distinguish
One from the other.
I know that my mother told me across a table
at a restaurant with the word “Dutch” in the title.
She told me with the same tone my father had told me about the divorce 8 years earlier, like she expected me to be upset
But because this move meant leaving our house with no plumbing
or phone or friends for the comfort of the city, I was delighted.
At first, anyway.
That was before I understood what living with a man who wasn’t my father, meant.
I had some suspicions about what living with a woman who wasn’t my mother might be.
My future stepmother had already revealed some fairly fairy tale like
stepmother behavior before she’d even taken the job.
But the effects of a formerly cheerful fellow suddenly taking up the reins
of a pseudo stepfather were slow to shake the foundations.
My father’s wedding: an earthquake
My mother’s submission: an aftershock
Or a premonition
One following another
Following the other.
The Hamlet Project 