Shakespeare in Bed

Since I have been immersed in Shakespeare lately, this sonnet by Carol Ann Duffy caught my attention:

Anne Hathaway*

"Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed..."
(from Shakespeare's will)

The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where he would dive for pearls. My lover's words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses

on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme

to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he'd written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer's hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love--
I hold him in the casket of my widow's head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

*Shakespeare's wife.They married when he was 18 and she was 26.

The picture is of Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, which I visited in December.

Water, water, everywhere

I know that I've already posted Robert Lowell, but this is one of my absolute favorite poems of all time. I first read it about a year or so ago, and it eerily reminded me of a short story I had written a few years earlier. It is strange and wonderful to read a poem for the first time but feel that you already know it well. That's the power that this poem has over me.

Water

It was a Maine lobster town--
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,

and left dozens of bleak
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,

and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.

Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.
From this dance in time,
it seems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purpler,

but it was only
the usual gray rock
turning the usual green
when drenched by the sea.

The sea drenched the rock
at our feet all day,
and kept tearing away
flake after flake.

One night you dreamed
you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,
and trying to pull
off the barnacles with your hands.

We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.

Music & Air

I decided to choose this post's poem by going for whatever was on the 76th page of the 9th book of poetry on my shelf. Pretty random selection, but the result is good. Could it really have been bad, though? Anyway, this is from Seamus Heaney's book "Door into the Dark." If you love poetry and music, this one should grab you.


The Given Note

On the most westerly Blasket
In a dry-stone hut
He got this air out of the night.

Strange noises were heard
By others who followed, bits of a tune
Coming in on loud weather

Though nothing like melody.
He blamed their fingers and ear
As unpractised, their fiddling easy

For he had gone alone into the island
And brought back the whole thing.
The house throbbed like his full violin.

So whether he calls it spirit music
Or not, I don't care. He took it
Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.

Still he maintains, from nowhere.
It comes off the bow gravely,
Rephrases itself into the air.


from "Poems: 1965-1975"

The picture is a view of the Atlantic from Doolin, Ireland from my 2004 trip:

"In a pub at the edge of the world, I eat a bowl of seafood chowder. The Atlantic ocean air, whisking inside with every swing of the door, seeping in window-frame cracks, stirs through the trings of an Irish man's guitar. Low light reddens curls of his thin brown hair, and old men planted on barstools hold their dark pints of Guinness mid-air. We, a bunch of college students from America, stop our jabbering and listen in respectful and curious silence as gravelly voices join the musician for the chorus of a ballad all of them know."