Of every death
Preceding this moment in time
As I stand before a painting
Of a young woman hanging drowned
In a scene inlayed
With thoughtless flowers,
Which death is it,
Exactly,
That renders Millais' Ophelia
With its beauty?

The work alone has form:
Flora, depth, the colour of minute lights
And the image has concept:
A woman, dead in water.
Ophelia lives in an image and a play:
One moment, one story
Resting on the temporal slopes
Of this painted pinnacle of signs.
Why did Shakespeare write
About a woman pushed to suicide
By the death of her father,
At the hands of a heroic lover feigning Spiritual vacancy
At the request of his own undead parent?
Does every woman share this fate,
Or is it fantasy -
Attaining psychic substance
Through a kind of impossible insanity?
In other words:
Is Ophelia's death,
So chosen by Millais
And Shakespeare in turn
(Whose names are poetry)
A mimetic echo of a million mortal moments?
Or is it the prophecy of a time yet to come
For which death has been moulded
In a looping narrative cast,
Made into a word describing
Some sacred foreseen feature -
Which is it:
Does meaning sink into the past
Or fly into the future?

I could swear the way the men clustered around me after meeting they thought this below was a mere pretty fantasy....and perhaps you alone know differently, Adrian.

(sonnet #MMMMMMCCCCIII)


Lo, how I hear the Beatles' cherished scale
Of "Yesterday--" 'non waltzing, like the sense
We know by instinct, though by Shakespeare thence
I thought to ink--what? cycling through the tale
Of prairie grasses blackbirds' rakish hail
Mocks?  Or those blue skies cloud fluffs whitely fence
In lazy, um, battalions?  Or from hence
As Will said, how I feel, likeas t'avail?
When you say "lacy," to ask me if your
Prompt, erm, hit home?  And how I long to do--
Not home-made popsicles, nor when in tour
I lost my first tooth blowing up that new
Um, kiddie pool--but you know.  Is it poor?
Cuz summer's so short-lived, but I love you.

05Jun17b

Shake-speares sonnets back in the day...



(sonnet #MMMMMMCCLXIV)


Oh me!  I never knew sich weary hours a sense
Of being half sick owns, whilst naught does avail,
This fevered longing mine as clouds' thin veil
Shows fragile blue skies, and warm notes from hence
Akin to daffodils' gay yellows thence
Abob to vagrant winds, where ne exhale
But haunts like to a ghost in sheer betrayl,
Nor moves the baby leaves hung in suspense.
Pink mists frame naked boughs as buds now tour
Those blackened skeletons of trees I do
'Non cherish in their wanting state, rain fer
All that a moistened kiss mair fit to woo
Than ist Baroque strains I sip coffee's cure
To?  Andrew, I swear oh, how I love you.

13Apr17b

...miss Andrew.  L14:  Will didn't?



(sonnet #MMMMMMCCLXV)


Ya, moonlight at my feet whileas in pale
Excuse strings whine oer how I slumber thence?
The violin half shrieking, thet eye hence
Just stares down through my window to detail
My auld duvet as if on purpose, frail
White on the side I allus choose, a sense
Of what? 'non waiting in sheer silence, whence
Note how, and switch the radio off to scale.
I'm hungry now tis midnight--is that poor?
Twa sips of coffee, cold and stale ist too?--
Twelve hours 'go when twas fresh---and who cares fer
All that by now?  Not me.  Let Shakespeare do
Up lines none read cuz oh! we love as twere
His plays.  We don't, at that.  But ah, who knew?

13Apr17c

Shakespeare was always fond of tragedies.*
From the star-crossed lovers of Verona,
Romeo and Juliet,
to the revenge-stricken prince of Denmark, Hamlet.
Sometimes I wonder
if he was the author of our fate,
for our love has slowly become a tragedy.


(k.p.)

This distance between us occupied
minutes and hours multiplied
by walking and running thoughts,
divining the cost of careless loss
roving and darting with such might
not even a rest in dreams of night.
Then a trouble or something tragic
pauses me, and a moment of magic
makes all that distance naught.
I fly to you my love in thought
bound again by strings unclear
I yearn and ache to have you near.
     But again the world cries out to me
     and again I am gone - in its roiling sea.