from Five Variations on a Phrase
from Shakespeare
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
playing heads or tails.
Once again we listen to the
flippant question and watch
The two sides of the coin chase
each other up and down
A column of air, like lizards
playing on a Roman column
In the sunlight, then resting
together in the shadow of his hand.
Are we watching gravity or
levity? Tragedy or travesty?
Shakespeare is the ocean
underneath the boat
Of our comprehension, underlying
it or overturning it,
As the case may be. Stoppard has
filled up the bathtub
And given us some clever toys to
play with.
The other side of the coin? Very
few of us set out to sea
Anymore, whereas we all take
baths now and then.
Perhaps the truth is that these
two wizards
Chase each other upstage and
down,
Each one trying to swallow the
other's tale,
Before they come to rest together
in some shady part of our mind.
They say the lizard of mythology,
the ourobouros,
Swallowed its own tail, making a
circle that got smaller and smaller until …
Until what?
Maybe its final dimension was
that of a coin,
Its head on one side, its tail on
the other.
Maybe this is the true, Ovidian
origin of the coin.
If so, it retains some feeling of
its ophidian origin,
Cool, heavy, smooth, gliding. Are
not the serpent's scales
Bright coins fanned out along its
back?
Then, too, money has inherited
the snake's ability to fascinate us.
I wonder if the lucky English
hangman understood
Any of this when he inherited the
property of Rosencrantz,
And along with it, his famous
trick coins.
Did he grasp anything of their
long and sinuous ancestry?
Did he ever toss one in the air,
or did he head off afterwards
Straight to the pub, thumbing
them greasily in the pocket of his pants?
Rosencreutz and gilding stone are
dead.
The bloom is off the rosy cross
and all
That's left of alchemy will be
its dross:
Leaden prose and stiff-jointed
picture
Allegories, washed up on the
beach,
Too rank to please, too recondite
to teach.
Far out to sea, colossal
Shakespeare saw
Dramaturgy wrestling thaumaturgy
And knew that necromancy's pomp
and circumstance
Would soon be dead as
Guildenstern and Rosencrantz.
Frankincense and gold and myrrh
are dead
And if we followed now to where
the three
Wise men were led, the only thing
we'd see
Would be a pile of dirty straw
for a bed.
"Benjamin
Franklinstein" was a phrase I read
Many years ago, and still
remember:
A portmanteau one critic built to
hold
His theory that the figure of Ben
Franklin,
So homely to us, yet numinous to
the poet Shelley
For casting his line into the
stormy sky one night
And reeling in a flickering
blue-white snake,
Cast a long shadow over him
And his wife Mary when they
decided,
With Byron and Polidori, to see
which one
Of them could write the best
ghost story.
For was not the monster himself,
dismembered
And remembered, a living
portmanteau,
A suitcase filled with other
people's bones?
Franklin, stern, the champion of
thrift,
Gave lavishly of himself to bring
the gift
Of knowledge to his fellow men,
and when
Ben cast his kite into the storm,
the lightning
Flash xerographied the image of
Enlightening Franklin on young
Shelley's mind
And frightening Frankenstein came
forth -
See where he glistens on his
metal bed,
Some parts old, some parts blue,
Some parts borrowed, some parts
glued.
And so the demiurge, no stranger
to
Economy in matters of design,
Has sewn together all of these,
his protégés,
With just one brilliant jagged
line.
