Juliet and Her Romeo
Where could they find a world outside this stage,
a place that isn't cultural shorthand for
romantic love? The space is not the thing,
rather the play, a language world with all
the assumptions, protocols, demands, and rules
of anguish and desire—punto riverso,
passado, and the hay into the heart,
the two to set you up, the third in your bosom.
Not long before, some centuries, they were
a couple of unfortunate lovers thralling
themselves to unhonest desire. But when they hear
about Queen Mab, they face into another
world, Celtic, erotic, and uncanny, full
of more—of possibility, opening,
and chance, as when they talk at Juliet's window
after the ball, and now she knows the script,
she knows they're in a play, how it goes: Dost thou
love me? I know thou wilt say 'Ay', and I
wilt take thy word, so she critiques the lines
that Romeo deploys seducing her—
O swear not by the moon, th'inconstant moon—
because she's trying to revise the tale
they're in so she can play the role to her
advantage. In the night-time window scene,
she exits and returns so many times,
it's like she's trying to revise the world,
creating scene after scene, beginning again.
What language could enable her to choose
and marry who she wants, as partner not
commodity? Although the Friar loves
them both, his stupid plan, with Juliet's
fake death, his fantasy of reconciling
the warring families with an illegal
marriage, and resurrection of her body,
does little good, and really does more harm.
He means well. That much I know. I was him,
carrying a letter in my jacket pocket
from a student decades ago, who volunteered
at an orphanage abroad, where an accident
occurred that took her life. She sat with others
on the luggage rack of an old bus that lost
its power, rolling down a hill. A boy
sitting beside her lived, but had to live
with losing her. We spoke and cried. I knew
the boy, a student years before this death,
her death. The accident was no one's fault,
but everyone's lament, and no return.
Her letter came a week after she died,
accounts of how they held and fed the kids,
plans for the future, Creole vulgarities,
and I have more to tell you, but I'm sick of writing.
When I sat there reading, she was alive again,
briefly breathing, and then she died all over.
In the play, she helped me with the final scene,
when Laurence finds the two he loves. I couldn't
get the feeling right until I played,
in memory, the principal's phone call
telling me there'd been an accident,
and Mary Anne didn't make it out. Laurence
really tries to help, but very poorly, like
my inability to keep a student
I loved alive, and as we ran together,
helped contrive a way to get her parents
to let her go abroad although they feared
that something bad might happen—and it did.
So there's a way, in this circumstance, I helped
to kill her, unintentionally, of course,
but all the same, it is the brutal truth,
brutal because it's true. What could I do
when the curtain rose one final time and the cast
glared at the Friar walking by, what could
I do but sympathize with that oafish man,
his public shame, and all his oafish guilt?
Sacred Harp
Rising falling voices modulating
fire sulfur snow-laden woods deep woods
where spring moss overtakes and rattlesnakes
reach skyward tongues flickering voices
undulant vulgar eloquent and holy firelight
lust charging jolts deep shadow
tabernacle that is the woods numinous
violent dangerous climbing
highest regions burrowing low
and lowest deeps dark raw-toothed unabsolved
where tales coalesce of hooded deities
murkiest breathing down and down breeding
and darkness enfolding breath of every
breathing note divinest longing consuming
flesh consuming exhaling silence lofty
hymns and loftiest spaces echoing
fiery deeps awash in what they cultivate.
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