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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I love when this is played as a joke
Though I see why it mightn’t be.
When these two characters’ sense of where a dead person might be contradict each other – it’s this happy collision of the intellect with the supernatural.
Horatio quite literally just saw Hamlet’s dad.
In Hamlet’s experience, there’s no way to see his supernatural father anymore –
But somehow, I love a Horatio who reels around looking for a ghost.
Despite the fact that he is reported not to be passion’s slave
I love when he’s a little jumpy. After all, his entire world-view has just been up-ended.
Things that he held to be fantasy have walked right before him, chilled his very marrow.
If he looks to see what isn’t there,
He’s become who he wasn’t
He’s transformed by his experience in scene 1.
I like a play that is an ever widening gyre of transformation.

Yesterday, I was thinking of my father’s wedding
Remembering what it was to be 12 and watching domestic disaster strike
in stepwalk slow motion.
I thought, briefly, of the one session of therapy they sent me to
(“Why do I have to go to therapy? You’re the one with the problem!”)
Which made me realize that I didn’t know which came first
My father’s wedding or my mother’s moving in with her boyfriend, me in tow.
One followed the other so closely that my memory cannot distinguish
One from the other.
I know that my mother told me across a table
at a restaurant with the word “Dutch” in the title.
She told me with the same tone my father had told me about the divorce 8 years earlier, like she expected me to be upset
But because this move meant leaving our house with no plumbing
or phone or friends for the comfort of the city, I was delighted.
At first, anyway.
That was before I understood what living with a man who wasn’t my father, meant.
I had some suspicions about what living with a woman who wasn’t my mother might be.
My future stepmother had already revealed some fairly fairy tale like
stepmother behavior before she’d even taken the job.
But the effects of a formerly cheerful fellow suddenly taking up the reins
of a pseudo stepfather were slow to shake the foundations.
My father’s wedding: an earthquake
My mother’s submission: an aftershock
Or a premonition
One following another
Following the other.

It sounds like a show put this way. Like there’s an admission charge
And a box office to buy tickets for the ritual.
What if people did buy tickets for funerals?
What if they were spectacles for which you angled to get a comp
Or got a wealthy patron to make a donation so you could accompany him to the funeral?
Theatre is a ritual, too.
But it’s a very expensive one around here
And after I’ve paid my admission fee, it often feels like an empty one
Like the funeral of a man that no one liked but we still have to go.

Is this a joke?
Did Horatio just make a joke?
Did Hamlet not get it?
Or is it a sort of self-effacing comment
Meant to lower his status in the eyes of those around him?
We’ve all just met Horatio and we already know he’s the least truant-y man around.
Is it perhaps a very bad lie?
Is it an attempt at evasion?
Was Horatio sent for?
Hamlet never asks him and Horatio only volunteers
That he came to see the funeral.
A truant disposition – well, no one with an actual truant disposition would say so.
Those that wriggle out of their obligations and slip the hook
Of their responsibilities would never own up to their evasiveness.
A slippery fish, once caught, will slip free again
Very easily
Sliding from a hand to the floor, to the water
Again and never look you in the eye.