Conflating you with me
You become almost more recognizable than me. You have become my mirror
More than my mirror. I look into you more often than I do the looking glass.
You hold more truth
More love
You’re warmer
You judge less
You understand much more than the mirror does and you can explain it.
I start to know your face
Better than my face
Because I look at yours more
And mine has layers of memories on it-
My face at seven, my face at 19, my face at 37.
If I were to lose the memory of myself
I would remember you
Or if I forgot you,
I would not be far behind.
Hamlet
I am glad to see you well.
What’s he doing calling Horatio “you”?
Aren’t they friends? Shouldn’t they be thou-ing each other?
Thou-ing and thine-ing?
If they’re such good friends and Horatio has come
For the king’s funeral, then Horatio has been here a month.
A month gone by and this is the first time they’ve seen one another?
Is Hamlet suspicious of Horatio in just the way he is (rightfully) suspicious
of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? Are they not intimates?
Do they become so over the course of the show?
“I am glad to see you well” Also rings of formality.
It’s not, “You’re looking good.” Or “How the hell have you been you old badger?”
It might even be a standard princely response to “Hail.”
Or – what if there were a period after “you”?
I am glad to see you.
Well. . .
And suddenly, it’s awkward, because Hamlet can’t recall this guy’s name –
This Italian guy who he knows he knows from somewhere
But, boy, is he out of context –
“Oh, it’s school! I know his name. And he’s –
that graduate student in the philosophy department and look at me, forgetting that.
How embarrassing. I hope he didn’t notice. Let me make sure he knows I know him
after all. Ah, Horatio, my good friend, my fellow student, not a truant.”
I am glad to see you well.
But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.
I’m sitting in this meeting at this job I don’t want.
They’re asking for my opinion but
They don’t really want it.
They’re really asking for me to affirm their policy –
To approve of their words and scheme.
I could let loose all the things I really think –
Let them cascade
Like slabs of limestone tipped out of a truck
But I’m worried about the shards.
I don’t want to hurt anyone with my broken bits of stone
And I don’t want to be buried in rock.
There would be repercussions
If I open my mouth.
I could tell the truth and bury myself
Or lie and bury my truth
Either way I end up buried and broken hearted.
It is not, nor it can not come to good.
The boxing in of art
Breaking it up into ever more digestible bites
Until you can’t begin to identify what it was
The more we try to justify what we do
The more we try to prove our legitimacy
The more we try to show that we can be just like math
Or just like social studies
Or just like the gutted, castrated, all the blood drained version of humanities
The more we become what we were not
The more we lose what made us great
The more we break open the mystery
To understand how it works
The more mystery flies away into the night
Never to be seen again.
O most wicked speed to post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
I don’t think I’ll be sharing the tongue twister
Of “incestuous sheets” with my class of 8th graders.
I’m always looking for new ones for them
But incestuous sheets might be pushing the content envelope a bit.
The music of this line is singable almost.
Like a really good stream of curses
This drives forward forward from the awful
To the most awful.
Speed is wicked, the dexterity is pretty bad
But incestuous sheets just take the damn cake!
Quickly quickly
Gertrude boxes herself up and has herself mailed.
Priority/Express/On Day Air
To these new sheets
The incestuous ones.
Within a month Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing of her galléd eyes She married.
Unrighteous tears oughtn’t have salt in them
Like the others.
You should be able to lick a tear stained check
And know
If her heart was in the crying.
That the tears and ocean are made of
The same stuff,
That our emotional tides churn salt
The way the moon shifts the journey of water
Fathoms deep,
That brine ebbs and flows
In the body as it does on the sand
Seems no small accident.
When I cry, I leak the taste of the ocean.
I release the memory of a wave.
Married with my uncle My father’s brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules.
Well, except both our names start with H and end in consonants.
Also, we were both deceived by our so-called friends.
I guess he’s got some issues with his dad, the same as me.
Though his dad was immortal and mine
Only seems to be, what with this ghost business.
He’s brawnier, that’s for sure –
Semi-divine and here I am, so flippin’ human
I can barely stand it.
O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason would have mourned longer.
A lion shakes his mane
Over the place the lioness laid herself down and died.
Her bones have long ago been picked clean by vultures
And the various insects who feed on decay.
There is nothing left here but a worn spot in the grass
Where the lion stands
To remember.
He roars sometimes.
Sometimes he just sleeps here.
There are moments wherein he paws the ground.
It looks as though he is hoping she will rise up
Through it
Grow out of it, like a reed.
Watching him,
I want poetry.
I want a few words that we could understand
Words that might give him something.
Not hope, no
Not consolation even.
Just a gift of something
Words
Or music.
There is no hugging a lion
But grief makes me want to sing to him.
A little month, or ere those shoes were old With which she follow’d my poor father’s body, Like Niobe, all tears:–why she, even she—
Gertrude bought a new pair of shoes to mourn in
The ones she had just didn’t go with the fabric of her widow’s dress.
The stories of grief and clothing are many
Wherein all the pain and shock and loss
Funnel themselves into the wrongness of the jacket
The offensiveness of the skirt
The threadbareness of the sweater.
Gertrude’s shoes might be those kind of new shoes
Or they might be a frivolity in a dark moment.
I’ve seen widows follow a corpse,
Heard one through the glass of the window upstairs.
A woman I knew to be wry and quick with a joke,
Understated,
Subtle,
Was shrouded in black and wailing.
Her sisters-in-law joined her in the sound but
It was clearly the aria of one woman, with a chorus.
We all walked silently
Followed the hearse from house
To church
Followed the widow
Following the body.
When the body moved from one house
To the next,
The wailing began again –
Every jostling
Every step closer to the grave
Would shake loose the cries
Would shake loose the tears.
I do not know if she had new shoes.
Frailty, thy name is woman.
Frailty, thy name is weak and brittle
Like dried yellow parchment
That falls apart at the slightest touch.
Woman, thy name is woman –
A slender green stalk that bends in the wind
A tree that reaches down and up
An ocean of movement
Rolling up, rolling down
Crashing and roaring
When pushed in the wrong direction.
Woman becomes frail
Like anyone becomes frail
When the life is draining out of her
Blood cooling
Energy waning
A leaf in winter
Ready to blow away into pieces.
The Hamlet Project 