During Shakespeare’s time, the Danes had a brutal reputation.
They were violent savages, rugged marauders
Responsible for the falling down of London bridge, my fair ladies.
Hamlet was a man out of line with his thug-ish culture
The one standing apart from the frat house antics of his family. Context
Can be everything.
Re-reading David Ball’s Backwards and Forwards, I was struck deeply
By this notion. It’s hard for us to see
This old stereotype. Claudius is such an expert politician.He almost sounds
Contemporary and there are a dozen refinements within this Danish court
But there are flashes – moments when one could see the brutality peeking through,
I think this is one of them.
If the play were set now, perhaps the play would be set in Al-qaeda headquarters
Or a Taliban court. We’d watch the people we think of as inhuman
Cycle through so many human machinations
Headed by one of the most human characters ever written.
We’d watch him struggle against the world he’s from
Until finally it all unravels in the savagery we expected in the first place.
We do sometimes honor our customs best in the breach.

Three ways to “yes” without once repeating.
More than yeah, yes, yep or sure, okay, it is
Or indeed, uh-huh, that’s so.

I stall with: “yes” when I’m thinking or when
I wish the answer were “no” – each “yes” filled with
New ambivalence, the secret wish for a different truth.

Faces all over the room are getting pinker
Redder
Deepening the shade with each bray of the trumpets.
The room is descending into a place where everyone
Is warmer and louder and less upright.
Several courtiers have gone horizontal.
The king has two men on either side of him
Maybe to hand him his Rhenish or maybe just
To keep him in his kingly posture.
Every time he brings his cup to his lips
The crowd goes wild – a refined room of nobles
Becoming a 20th century fraternity house
(Complete with the streaker midway through the night.)
Someone has hung his under garments on the nose
Of the wild boar stuffed on the wall.
The servants had to stop a duke from pissing in the corner several times
over the course of the night.
The savvy observer wonders if the king is actually drinking Rhenish.
He remains cool and calm
Putting on the show of drinking and loud macho camaraderie
But he seems vividly in control.
No article of his kingly costume has gone askew.

Waiting is like this –
Watching the clock –
The now not being
Nearly as important
As what’s about to happen
Or not nearly as tolerable.
Sometimes knowing the time
Is a help – the reminder that
This too shall pass. And sometimes
It murders the moment,
Killing the present with the future.

I am sitting in a wooden bench and table café
In front of a plate glass window.
I’m sitting on a school style stool – like from
Chemistry lab or something. I’m leaning
Into the brick wall next to me, trying to hide from the sun.
It’s September and in the 80s
And the glass acts like a magnifying glass
Baking my arms and face.
I have to wear sunglasses to look at the whiteness of the page.
I am trying to remember what it is like to be cold.
There’s something about a brittleness of the skin,
Lips cracked with dryness.
I can remember teeth chattering,
A mist emerging from me every time I speak,
A vague bouncing up and down,
Hands rubbing together
Every bit of skin exposed feels raw and beaten.
I think.
Right now – I don’t want to touch one arm to the other
For fear of combustion.

Those guys look cold and very serious
Maybe even a little frightened.
Is that a little gap above his jacket?
That little bit of wrist there
Showing between a glove and a sleeve
That’s bound to freeze them all the way through.
Doesn’t the wrist have a sort of temperature influence?
I have seen people put an ice cube there in summer to cool themselves down.
I will sink my airy teeth in right there and let the body do the rest of the work.

I think of this concept like an ingrown hair. At first,
It is completely hidden. Secreted away in the body
No trouble to anyone.
But as it grows,
It starts to push the skin
Reddening it
Making it tender
Making everyone wonder what’s beneath.
Soon, a spot of darkness
Begins to show
It becomes painful
But still there is nothing to be done really
Until it gets close enough to the surface to poke at and pluck from the body,
Healing by exposure.

Sometimes these lines line up
Exactly with my life.
Today my soul is fidgeting restlessly restlessly in this chair.
It’s straining at the multitude of restraints
That seem to hem it in.
It wants to fly out and wreck havoc
It wants to destroy –
It understands the goddess Kali now
Or any of the gods of destruction and chaos. Today, we are not attracted to the gods
Of chaotic mischief
Not the Lokis or the coyotes for me today. No, today my soul sits at the feet of the gods who will consume all before them
Who throw thunderbolts
And send floods.
There is one within here who wants to spin
And spin until she becomes a tornado
That will roll through everything around me
Upend the structures, the houses, the schedules
The way things are
Until only bits and pieces lie scattered on the fields.
I see, though, that tomorrow
I would regret those bodies strewn in my soul’s aftermath –
I would not be grateful to spend the next few years picking up those pieces
So I try to find a way to calm the raging waters til that storm has passed.

So many characters from these plays
Long for night.
I can’t think of a character that longs for day.
They usually curse it
For coming so soon.
I think especially of Juliet Capulet
Needing to put off daylight as Romeo prepares to go,
While the night before
She longed for night
She longed for night in the most palpably physical way.
“Come night, come night –”
Suing to the night for its arrival
To bring Romeo to her.
This wishing for night here in Hamlet
Is a little more subdued –
A little more of suspense
Of twitchy fingers and killing time
To watch for what has been set in motion.
What do you do between the revelation
That the ghost of your father has appeared
And the opportunity to see that ghost?

This is one of those instances where the word
Means the opposite of what we think it means, isn’t it?
When he says “Doubt” he means “suspect,” I suspect
because why would he doubt
Something that has yet to be raised.
If I had a scholar’s note in front of me
I might find this alternate look at the word “doubt”
With all the instances in which it was used
As its opposite
But I always get contrary
With these contrary meanings
And wonder if I couldn’t play the word as it reads now –
If Hamlet, for example, were to both raise and dismiss the idea of foul play
In an instant.
That would be awfully interesting.