This line begs further analysis and/or investigation. The only time I can imagine saying “I am ill at these numbers” would be in relationship to a set of figures that have recently been revealed. Like, if I’d just lost a fortune in the stock market and my financial advisor just showed me the details. Those numbers might make me ill. Or, more like MY life, if I just saw the negative balance in my bank account next to the number of my student loan payment. I have been ill at those numbers. But somehow I don’t think that’s love poem material. Stars, sun, truth, love, financial report?
Nope. Numbers must be pointing at something else. Illness being a perfectly normal response to love, it must be the numbers that are something other than numbers.
It’s not like Hamlet is confessing an odd quirk wherein the mention of #7 makes him nauseous. Plus, no numbers follow “These numbers.” It doesn’t read: I am ill at these numbers: 7, 23 and 15. But what these numbers are is a total mystery to me. I make a little stretch to the numbers of feet in a verse and wonder if he’s saying, “O Ophelia, I’m a lousy poet.” Because that would make sense. Particularly because he kind of IS a lousy poet if this love letter is any indication.
He’s kind of the best poet ever in his everyday speech, though, so there’s that.
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By heaven, it is a proper to our age To cast beyond ourselves in our opinions As it is common for the younger sort To lack discretion.
Our class is dominated by older ladies
Who are awash with opinions and do not hesitate
To share them at every turn.
They cast the net of their opinions so far and so wide that they cast a spell of silence among the rest of us. Its power was strongest in the beginning because the young new arrivals are less hesitant to speak but those of us younger students were struck dumb by it.
In other contexts, I am a most vocal student but here, in three years, I have never said a word. We, the younger sort in this class, are not quite young enough to lack discretion. In this case, the proper aged ones do cast beyond themselves in opinion and are also lacking discretion.
I work with many of the younger sort, who do, decidedly lack discretion. Part of teaching very young people is, sometimes, the task of teaching discretion. Sometimes, I long to bring these older ladies in our class to my class and there perhaps give them an opportunity to re-learn discretion.
But, my good lord –
Reynaldo’s trying to speak some truth to power
(if in fact, he’s a servant as he is often played.)
He does not blindly accept an order.
He has to question it, understand it, point out the holes in the plan.
Those are some of the most important people in the world. The ones who will
stand up and ask questions make enormous differences for the rest of us.
I was proud of my student yesterday who kept his hand in the air,
Even while the Principal was moving on, taking the floor, clearly ready to wrap up. He left his hand up, straight up, until she finally called on him almost in annoyance saying, “What is your question?”
Which once he’d asked it, she answered, generously changing her tone. I love that he didn’t give up. I love that he got what he needed. I love that he made a space for himself and his class in a moment that wasn’t his to take.
Remember thee?
I’m sitting in a coffee shop on 86th and Amsterdam.
I don’t know whose iPod they’re running through the sound system
But they’re also running it through my memories.
That Van Morrison song called up my old boyfriend – made me remember –
Either his affection for me or maybe it was mine for him.
Anyway he learned that song – learned to sing it, too, for me, he said.
When it all fell apart,
That was the song that would make me cry
Whenever it caught me off guard
Because when it caught me,
I was always off guard.
Hearing it here now
Calls me to attention (off guard again)
But doesn’t call up tears.
It’s almost like a little ghost memory
Springing up out of the soundscape, saying, “Remember me?”
And of course I do.
Then the song was over,
The next one blended back into the hubbub of voices and cappuccino machines –
Maybe the next as well, I can’t remember.
But then up came the voice of an old friend
Singing a melancholy tune.
The first flash of memory
Was music of association
The next was the actual voice
Of someone I once loved
Someone whose voice I’ve not heard in person
For many years
But hearing it even now
Makes me seventeen again –
Dumbstruck and enthralled in a dark club
On an empty dance floor, in a deserted bar
And a little outdoor festival
When music struck me deeper
When longing was my primary occupation
When a voice like that wrapped me up
And carried me around like a swaddled child.
Even as I write these words,
The iPod remembrance pulls out another to remember –
One that spun around on my record player
While I lay on my back staring at the ceiling
Aching for the future to hurry up and get here.
O all you host of heaven!
Curious construction.
All you host.
Not you hosts
Or O you host.
No no
There is a sense of multitudes in all
And just one in host.
I suppose heaven has the capacity to contain multitudes
In the same way that a house
Can have many mansions
That one can be all
That each of us could be all of us
In calling on all you host of heaven,
Perhaps you cover both one-ness and all-ness,
One, all, everything.
O God!
It occurs to me that the editors
May have put this exclamation mark here.
Or the printers (I’ll have to check the folio, huh?)
Perhaps it’s a dash –
Perhaps Hamlet is about to swear.
Perhaps there is more.
A sort of “O God, I swear that my love for my father is such – etc”
I’m not sure what that possibility gives us but it occurred to me
Because I can’t think of another instance
In the plays in which a character exclaims this way.
It feels like a very contemporary exclamation –
And an oddly brief and direct response from Hamlet.
It’s also curious that he says this, not after all the terrible descriptions of the hell
That his father has been condemned to, but at the mention of love.
If it’s a gasp, as it’s often played –
It’s interesting that it happens when the focus shifts to fatherly love.
I’m also amused that Hamlet has been quiet all this while
Until a line after he’s been told to “List, list, O list” and then he starts talking.
This happens in classrooms too. As soon as a group of people have been told
To listen carefully, that’s when they start talking.
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Be they intents wicked or charitable, Thou comest in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee.
Hamlet always seems to shout this at the ghost of his father.
Whenever I’ve seen it, he’s straining toward him
Calling to him, wondering to his ghostly face
If he’s a goblin or from hell.
When I read the part myself last year
I think I did the same. But reading it now –
I see that he says he WILL speak to him.
The speaking will come in the future – and this
Makes so much more sense as a sort of thoughtful aside – perhaps even as far as –
“I’ll call thee” which comes next.
What if there were a period after, “I’ll call thee.” ?
There is then
Consideration, planning and then execution.
If this first bit is not directly to his ghostly father,
We see him considering his strategy
Contemplating his choices
Then rocketing forward.
That’s our Hamlet.
Think yourself a baby That you have ta’en these tenders for true pay Which are not sterling.
I’m in my father’s living room on the couch that is also my bed when I stay with him.
I have a catalogue and in it are lots of toys.
There’s a doll in there that I have fallen in love with. She’s got
Real looking hair and she’s beautiful. I want to have her.
My father’s girlfriend is with me.
She’s sitting on the navy blue coverlet, across from the TV.
I show her the picture and I ask her about what’s written there. I hear the price.
I say, “Okay! I have fifty!” (Or however much it was. I don’t remember the numbers.)
Karen finds me amusing. She says, “You have fifty dollars?”
I say, “Sure. See?” And I show her my collection of coins. I’m sure I have fifty of them.
She tells me, no, no – this is paper money you need.
I assure her that this will be no problem either as I have plenty of paper money.
I do not yet know the difference between play money and the money that becomes
Much more complicated as I get older – The money that I’ll never have enough of –
Because right there, right then, I have everything
And she’s so silly, this woman, not to believe I can buy this thing.
He hath, my lord, of late made many tenders Of his affection to me.
A single daisy placed in my hair
A note, with just my name and a heart
A gesture, a movement of a strand of my hair behind my hair behind my ear
With which he managed to brush both my cheek
And the slope of my ear and this tender place behind it
This look he gave me as he made a place for me beside him on the bench
A pear that he pulled from the tree while we walked through the garden
A quality of listening while I told him what I thought was a stupid story
The pressure of his hand on my back as we walked in to dinner
The program that he folded into a hat and placed upon my head
A little song he sang to me with my name in it
Time, collapsed into nothing so that there’s nothing to do but look at one another and intertwine our fingers.
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.
The Hamlet Project 