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.

The ministers of grace have high collars and they sit
At high tables on chairs just as high. They have large books of grace that they refer to from time to time – a log of acts of grace from each and every person.
Every time grace is given to someone,
The ministers write it down in the books.
When they do, they often discover that they’ve conferred
Extra grace on this or that person and they flag that page with a little red thread.
They mean it all to be fair but there isn’t time to check the books
Before conferment. Not usually. And the red threads fall out sometimes
As they lift the books from shelf to table.
The floor is littered with little well meaning red threads and some blues ones as well.
The blue thread is for the ones who have no marks next to their names in the book
Or only a few. They mean to give these ones extra grace, extra defense, extra hope but The ministers are very busy. Like everyone and the system is flawed and they don’t have The time or the manpower to change it. The man that cleans the ministry’s chambers Picks up the blue threads carefully out the day’s sweepings. He collects the threads
In mason jars. Slowly, he has been weaving them together making a thick blue rope.
Jars and rope give his room a light blue glow that some times lights his careful work.

Just the tiniest bit of arsenic can totally ruin
A big glass of milk. Just the smallest taste
Of acid can muck up a whole stomach.
Is it fair that in a body
Just a little bit of ill
Can lead to the ruin of it entirely?
No spirit is all good. We would not be human if it were.
But somehow our faults glare so much brighter,
Blinding us to our good.

This sentence is as long as a sonnet.
Is there a longer sentence in the canon?
There is great curiosity in these 14 lines,
Much to wonder at. He’s talking in the abstract
But I have to wonder what he’s trying to say about himself –
What in his birth would he like to be absolved of?
How has he been corrupted from whatever he may perceive
As his fault?
Or is he somehow trying to understand Claudius?
Trying to find an excuse for him and what he knows of his behavior thus far?
Is he finding him guilty of drinking too much
While simultaneously trying to forgive him for it?
He may be holding forth in this academic way
For the benefit of his college buddy or perhaps
He’s afraid and finds long clauses comforting.
I’m sure this sentence is usually cut. I cannot imagine
How to get my mouth around it entirely –
But there is some nugget in this thesis of his.
It is spoken seconds before the ghost of his father arrives.
Is it, perhaps, a link to his father?
Is he wrestling with forgiving his dad before he arrives?
His thinking isn’t clear. It’s sophisticated but muddled, full of tangents
And side journeys.
What is Shakespeare doing here? He precedes the ghost’s entrance
With almost incomprehensible text.
It is the opposite of the first ghost scene
Full of short clear sentences, setting us up to want desperately for the ghost to speak.
Is he turning our ears to disorientation? Tuning us out of speech to have us experience the arrival with something else?
Our bodies?
Our hearts?
All the other senses?
Perhaps he wants us not to listen
So that we just sit, squirming in our seats
Waiting for the ghost to arrive.

If I could understand my own pith and marrow
Of my own attribute, I feel like I might
More readily notice its theft.
Sometimes I steal it myself – unknowingly, of course, just –
Whoop – the marrow is sucked out of something;
Its inner substance, the heart of it, vanished.
Oftener, though, I catch my pith dissipating in the daily diminishments,
The tiny shavings of my wooden sculptures, not seeming to
make much of a difference at first
but over time, the figure, once a woman, loses an arm,
a leg, a shoulder, a cheek,
until it is no longer recognizable as a woman.
Something once clear and elegant becomes abstract and unbalanced
From all the little wood chips of compromise.
But it’s not this visible, no,
The marrow is on the inside of the inside
When it is stolen away
Our bones become brittle and the very foundations of ourselves
Can no longer stand.
This wooden figure of a woman loses her arm
First from the inside
So that for the outside viewer, she appears the same
Until she becomes so hollowed out
That what was arm becomes empty space.
I have a gallery of these pieces,
If you saw them, you might think they’d stand forever
But slowly, slowly
They are losing their shine, their luster and
What’s holding them together.

This new wing of the house still has that fresh paint smell.
The walls are sturdy as of a few weeks ago. We bought
Furniture – tables and chairs and lamps and a puffy sofa.
Did you see our coffee table books? We never had anything like them before.
This one features photos of trains from the Roaring Twenties,
Beautiful photographs of iron and gears and retro signs that were brand new then.
This book is hardly used, hardly opened.
The pages could cut you.
We shouldn’t have invited those people over.
They may not have tracked literal mud into our new addition
But their boorish behavior has left dirt all over the place.

Where do they have a party tax?
What country charges another for their drunkenness?
I picture the party nations – the coastal cities
That tolerate the tourists from darker climes –
Counting their money from their foreign guests
Happily feeding them daiquiris and overpriced snacks.
Package tours pay for the roads and the schools
Under palm tress but this is not about that –
This is where understanding exactly what taxing other nations meant in the 17th century, Not to mention figuring out what it means to be traduced. I imagine it as a combination
Of trade and seduced, that is, seduced into
Trading valuable goods for trinkets
Like gold for plastic beads.
Bring me my Lexicon, text caddy!