Ophelia

a poem with reference to Hamlet

Awhile, awhile, down the crooked stile
Where the flowers blossom upon skulls in the ground
And water-weeds are thick on the scalp of the stream
Awhile now, as the world waits for spring
And its sprinkles of rain, that unearth the life
From the winter mausoleum:
Watch the corpses begin to bloom.

Up on the hill a man with a spade
Grave-digger or gardener I cannot tell
Now and then he holds up a skull
Then flings it back into the furrows he’s made
To trough and plow the fertile soil.
These faces he buries, he knows none and yet all
The balding heads, the ivory pall
The common grin beneath the flesh
Are flowerpots now in the soil.

‘The play’s the thing’,
And Hamlet’s questions whispered in the wind
The actor’s lines and a hundred musings
Of what is to be or not to be
They tickle the boughs of the willow tree
Who laughs and promises that the audience leaves
Each with that happy common grin
Of a common happy ending.

The stream is lively, rife with life
The gurgling of worm-fattened fish
Glutted on a feast of kings
The rustle of the willow leaves,
Dirt sighing from a shovel.
But the distant melody of a lovelorn lady
Stops all natural sounds awhile,
Like wonder-wounded hearers
Music rising from the running stream
Dirges to the moon, songs from a dream:

Crowned with weed and flower
Ophelia drifting down the water
The sound of a name,
The kiss of thyme
On her lifting singing scarlet lips,
The flowering of rhyme.
Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies;
Good night, good night.

___________________

This poem reminds me of so many things, written in a time when I was a different person, in different circumstances and a different state of mind.

Some of my favourite verses from Hamlet; none of the befuddling riddles from the protagonist this time, but several illuminating truths in luminous verse from the Player King through whom Shakespeare speaks in pellucid style:

"The violence of either grief or joy
Their own enactures with themselves destroy:
Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament;
Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.
This world is not for aye, nor 'tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change;
For 'tis a question left us yet to prove,
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love...

Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own..."

Hamlet strikes me so frequently as a play within a play, the literal drama involving the Player King and Queen that Hamlet stages for Claudius notwithstanding. Curiously, the personality that is Hamlet himself seems to me to merely be acting in the role of Prince Hamlet, like an actor who has put on Hamlet's shoes for fun. Yet he appears not just to be an actor of himself, but also as the director of the play he stages, wondering "to be or not to be". Like a director calling for the curtains to fall on the close of the play, his last lines in Hamlet ring with a proud finality: "The rest is silence."

The real playwright, of course, is Shakespeare.

in passing

Time comes to me
as the shortening of distances
the regularity of tiles underfoot,
bent by contours of the ground
but locked in place by the scoured
edges of clay.
Time awakens me
with the thinning of my soles
the prickle of my chin in the morning
a cup of tea suddenly empty in my hand
fingernail clippings.

I remember you in passing,
the brush of your shoulder
stubborn with the intractability of attraction
of nods and “good mornings” without goodbyes
the patter of conversation the clatter of our
retreating footsteps.
I remember you in passing
as I tread the tiles of time
but the echoes of your footsteps
in my mind go round and round.

flower

friendship is not
a rose, it is a sunflower
and it must not be watered
with tears, fed by moonlight
or sung to in the shadows.
it needs no promises or paeans
or dirges in the dark
no blood to make its petals proud
or wine to make it flush.
no thorns to warn of its dangers
or careful affection and protection
from the worldly wind or cynical cold.
friendship is built from loyal smiles
not faithful tears, and graced
by compassion, not the crudeness of passion.
friendship is a sunflower
grown to complement green fields
and blue skies, not candlelight or
tenderness or tremblings in the dark.
sunflowers need only sun,
and there is always sun
where sunflowers are found, and
fertile, happy soil.
roses bloom best alone
on envelopes, in pockets, between
gentlemen's teeth, at most in
bouquets of ten or twelve.
sunflowers are unmistakeable, impeccable,
unimpeachably cheerful.
they grow in fields.

you walked toward me, with a flower in hand.
from a distance I could see the joy on your face
but the flowers you brought
were yellow.

remembering

i.
you open your eyes
in some corner of my mind
they are blinding in the darkness.
from some distant memory
too old and vivid for imagination
you open your eyes.

my work swims before me on the page
because you are staring.
don’t you know it’s rude? but
your eyes are too bright,
i can’t stop you from staring
i cannot help it.


ii.
i would like to give you a flower
the petals grasped in my fist
it is still fresh, from where i wrenched it
still scarlet and warm and somewhat wet
i have torn it from a moistness
rather too fertile, somewhat too early
but yearning to be plucked.
still raw with immaturity i have
grasped it, and wrested it
gasping from my chest,
a root of my heart.


iii.
some people you cannot forget.
some people sweep through your life
and pass through you
with the ghost of their hand still warm
in your twitching fingers.
some you cannot bear to think
are not thinking about you.
and others you want to lie beside
within the quietude of grass
in the morning.
for some people you write poems
and with every atom of your fractured will
wish they were lies—
words welded by hopes and hallucinations
with rings and roses and the
pirouette of your pen,
words melting into ink under your gaze.

from some people you walk away
but turn again at twelve paces,
for love is a duel,
and remembrance in the sudden meeting of eyes—
the denial of forgetting
for better or for worse.

______________________

for you.

well-wishes

I have watched the rain shimmer down
into the slow gravity of the well
and listened for the answer of its borrowed voice
the watering of words by growing rain.
it is a voice made eloquent by stillness and silence
by whispered wishes and hidden hopes
a throat filled with echoing ambitions
fed with the fortune of many coins—
of past and present, of dreams and black water
the smile of Narcissus to peering ferns
a ring of promises, made and remade
to have and to hold, in sickness and health
flowers flickered and tossed, love found and lost
secrets and regrets funnelled below
time's iniquities, memory's infidelities
dissolved in opaqueness, blind eye of the well
the weight of words unspoken.
the faces throng the stony circle,
with changing voices they laugh and cry
and throw their noises into the quiet earth
at night they draw buckets of stars
their tears hurled like spears into deceiving waters.
the lovers, old men and ghosts walk by
in the kiss of the well they have drowned too much
sung too loudly and laughed too well
the immolation of a selfless self-lived passion
the smoulder of stars at apogee and perigee.
these walls have been shaped, carved like the wind
by the whispers of men and the sighs of women
rounded by the tumble of Sisyphus' stone
its waters still but changing still
marking with ripples each quiet visitor
the fingerprint of every tear.

the seasons change, time comes and goes
old men are born and babies age
in the morning the women draw water with buckets
in the rain the waters shimmer back down
not old or new, too ageless to tell
a voice drifting in the gravity of the well.

_____________________

About some things I tend to forget frequently and have to relearn every so often.

between the lines

in the gaps between dreams where we lurch and fall
the emptiness of teacups between tilting jugs
within the frozen moments when eyes grow cold
the silence when laughter sputters and dies
between the flight of sentences missing each other
the suffocation between each desperate breath
in the sudden spaces, in the unbearable lightness
in the hesitations and expectations and surprises
the loss of balance between every footfall
love dying under the cracks of your smile
along half-finished highways and spaces for unbuilt buildings
between the regularity of streetlamps, the flicker of the bulb
in the waiting, the stormclouds in the distance
the blindness of blinking eyelids
the death between heartbeats
after the falling of new seeds
before wounds begin to bleed
the clearing of the throat
the pause of the pen
the end.

_______________________

Written rather hastily, recently, about transitions and absurdities and the lost time between beginnings and endings.

Ahh so I finally have my own blog.

Enough of reading about other people's lives, here's my own.