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To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare
If books are crypts — and all things
are
that come from churches with soaring vaults
and knights buried under gravestones laid
end to end to make a floor — you sit
inside yours, whistling, arranging flowers,
and serving tea to princes and kings,
and any of us who stumble in, shaking
off the rain, folding our umbrellas
and taking off our bicycle clips,
so don’t be disappointed if I don’t put you
on a pedestal with Billy Crystal and the envelopes
while cameras flash and the stars in their ranked
rows titter, on cue. Don’t get me wrong —
if I thought you were a man for our time,
Eminem in blackface or one of the Swollen Members,
I would, and let you run up the steps
to thank your Mom, your wife,
and the girl from the steno pool.
Come on, smile. Show your teeth!
Your friends could hide their knives for the night,
Demi and Meg, Robert and Tom, and clap
as the camera swung over them,
while the sharks from People cruised
the lobby looking for scraps. When they pushed
the microphone in front of me, I’d gather them
around like freshmen in a composition class
and explain how your writing makes Brecht
look like an agent provacateur
and Coppola like a backyard winemaker
in Napa County. Maybe you never took your PhD
at Iowa or the State University of New York,
and never even heard of Baudrillard,
but I wouldn’t hesitate to bring back the shunned
dead from the 2000 books bombed by Fritz
in a Belgium convent back when war was still a lark
propped up on lies and not the dread
that closes our eyes each night with a blackened finger,
just to hear you step out of the words again,
with your thin cough, and leap
onto the stage, your sword thrust out,
to engage false kings, blind princes,
wise fools and the foolish wise
on a point of steel, or flesh,
to prove that you can be compared only
with the life you lived (and loved),
the plays you wrote, and the crowds
that roared at all your clowns
and brought the haughty down,
reshaped pride, made language new
and history old. It’s a wonder you weren’t
under house arrest. It always pays
to give the people what they want.
London! Look in the mirror that winds
through your city like a snake: you have
no other prince than this, who was no prince,
and not the lapdog of the fairy queen
or the king of bibles, but a new language
coming into its own: a language of men
and women, a priceless — and deathless — gift,
as long as we speak the words, say the spell, and sprinkle
salt on our wooden floors late at night
when the bad dreams come. They come. At 2 a.m.
In spades. I can’t even read Shaw anymore
and hope to make it through the night, and Updike’s
voyeur shots make me impatient for Ophelia’s lap
or even Gertrude’s fear. Gilbert and Sullivan
are lost on me. Spare me the bound feet
and the Titanic. I cringe with embarrassment,
as if puppets were set loose in the streets
and told to act as men and women in the world,
and to think that such men direct the wars
that kill our peace, oh, don’t make me go there,
Shakespeare, it makes me rage and shout out wildly to the
trees.
Any journalistic hack can dribble out a few drops
of love, an analysis of the senate committee
on god knows what, and publish it on the Internet.
With any luck, the CIA will
even lick it up and pass it on
to the president, who will read it back at a news conference
,
neatly tied with ribbons and a Hallmark photo op.
Art, though, counts for a lot, still, don’t get me wrong.
Art is what separates each word from itself, and gives to
us
what we gave to that word in all the moments of our lives;
anyone who dares to thrust his arms into the Big Bang,
must sweat as God beats them on his anvil in Bayreuth,
be turned upon his back and beaten again, and only then
cry out the words that bring men praise. A good poet
can’t be beaten enough, yet first must learn
not to praise himself but to turn each word
upon its head and shake the stuffing out,
then set it straight upon the barman’s counter,
and fill it up, with patience, so as not to lose the head,
and you could pull your bitter with the best.
Look how the poets line up at the trough as Kirke
shovels out the slop, each one pink, and with
a tail curled up tight above each ass.
Those are not your descendants.
Yours have better manners, live out in the streets
and fields of verse, meet every few years,
bring out a bottle from downstairs,
and toast, not success, but words that demand
the world to think. All else is lies. You came first
to this coast in the Golden Hinde — a pirate ship;
next in The Discovery, a barque of war,
and if you come again, it will be in a cruise liner
from Norway with ballroom dancing every night,
tugs tooting, and streamers falling from the rail
as you pass beneath Lions Gate: in triumph.
And after all the glitterati descend the ramp
to spend an evening on Robson Street,
with all-night shopping at the GAP,
you will step out unannounced, a blackjack
dealer from the lower deck, and will know
the city as she knows herself: undressed.
As the crowds trip out of rented tents — your plays exhausted
for the night, their clowns panting from their stunts —
stunned, trickling across cold grass to their cars
and back to life from the cryogenics of their last three acts,
you are my Falstaff, my Puck, my mad sad king.
Since you’ve left, there has been no art in the stage
and no stage in art, only black curtains pulled over the city,
and men stumbling along under streetlights,
half drunk, almost wordless with rage
and mute incomprehension of the world
you wrote and the parts we love to play.
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