Mr. Hamlet would pick up
Little Horatio after baseball practice.
He’d ask after his mother
Give him a juicebox
Pat him on the shoulder
When some injustice at school stained his face with tears.
Mr. Hamlet, like a second father,
Watched Horatio grow
Getting taller and shorter and taller
than his son.
When the boys came home from school
Mr. Hamlet asked after Horatio’s
Prospects, how he found his housing
How he enjoyed the weather.
Did they know each other?
Certainly.
But did Horatio know how Mr. Hamlet
Longed for a patch of land
Near his old estate?
Did he know how he
Withered a bit
Whenever his proud cousin came to town?
Did he know about that night one September
When he sat in the kitchen with his belt around his neck,
Standing on a kitchen chair wondering?
Certainly not.
But one doesn’t need to know another’s secrets
To know him, right?
The man who sells the apples on the streets is known to many.
If he were to disappear
Many a fruit eater
Would contribute to the search call for help
Mourn his absence.
Even if no one ever knew
His love for daisies,
He would be known and lost.
Horatio
This to me In dreadful secrecy impart they did And I with them the third night kept the watch, Where, as they had delivered, both in time Form of the thing, each word made true and good The apparition comes.
Five lines of anticipation
For a hell of a pay-off
In line six.
Horatio picks up the thread with a bit of a story
Follows it
Carefully
Confirming each inch
As he moves along
To what could be a story all on its own.
If this last phrase
Were the first phrase
Of a novel,
A world would be opened up.
In fact, the scene which is described here
Is the opening of this world.
The coming of the apparition
Is the trigger
On the gun of this play.
Thrice he walked By their oppressed and fear-surpriséd eyes Within his truncheon’s length, whilst they distilled Almost to jelly with the act of fear Stand dumb and speak not to him.
Put me in a canning jar
Boil me in a pot
I am no longer the bright succulent fruit
Hanging from the vine
Fear has reduced me
Like heat and a sugar solution
To my very essence –
I will taste good in winter
When darkness and cold would keep me from growing
But I am boiled down
Bits of bone
Bits of stone
Bits of gristle and terror
In amongst what was once my personality.
What use is personality in this heightened moment?
No, I am naught but Fear Preserves.
A jam of the jammed.
A figure like your father, Armed at point exactly, cap-a-pe, Appears before them and with solemn march Goes slow and stately by them.
Horatio paints a picture.
He picks up the grey
Squeezes it onto his palette.
He is starting with the general wash
Dotting in the details
Then spreading them from top to bottom.
He moves the brush across the canvas
Deliberately
From one side to the other
Pushing the picture in all directions
From the middle of the page.
Two nights together had these gentlemen, Marcellus and Barnardo, on their watch In the dead waste and middle of the night Been thus encountered:
Hang on.
Marcellus and Barnardo are gentlemen?
I mean, I don’t mean to split textual hairs here
But isn’t a gentleman a somewhat specific designation in this time and place?
It’s not like Horatio’s just finding a nice way to say
“These two dudes. . .” So if they’re gentlemen. . .
Their entire status is very much different than one would think.
It would mean that they’re not simple security guards.
They are noble fellows
Charged with protecting their country.
It could be that Marcellus knows
Where to find Hamlet most conveniently
Because he’s a courtier himself.
And gentlemen holding the watch
Says something very particular about the state of affairs in Denmark.
When the rich folk get conscripted, we know trouble’s coming.
Season your admiration for a while With an attent ear till I may deliver Upon the witness of these gentlemen This marvel to you.
Everyone is pregnant
Waiting to be delivered of his or her own private marvels.
When the marvel comes,
Admiration pours in from all sides
And those of whom it is delivered
Become its ardent lovers.
Robyn (upon becoming a parent) asked what part of our biology
Gives us the instant belief that our children
Are the most marvelous of all the marvels in the world.
It is a smart trick of evolution
To make it so
That every child is held as treasure
To its admiring parents.
My lord, the king your father.
Lord king
Father
It’s a sentence full of God.
My the your
My god, my Lord
The king, the god
Your god, your father.
I’ve never had religion
But I live in this religious net
The one in which
The lord is a god is a father
So that even when
My agnostic/atheistic roots are showing
My hair still grows with a
Fatherly lord god king
Because there is just something in the fabric of our culture
that can’t have it any other way.
My lord, I think I saw him yesternight.
Just come out and say it.
Don’t preface your news with
I have something to tell you or
You might want to sit down.
Just spill it.
It doesn’t matter if it’s clear,
It will become so, eventually.
Don’t wait.
And whatever you do
Don’t say “I have to talk to you”
Just talk
It’s like those people who leave messages
That just say
“call me.”
I almost always don’t
In that situation
I need to know the news now
I don’t want to guess at it.
Of course, if you just called to say
Hello
And just want to have a chat,
That’s good too. . .
But oh my goodness
There’s nothing like a short brusque
“Call me”
To make me think of tragedy and run the other way.
‘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.
The Hamlet Project 