The Tent

Queen of the waffle iron,

generous dispenser of toothpaste,

sorceress of Mercurochrome,

player of games of smoky bridge

at which you won second-prize dishtowels,

brooder over the darning egg

that hatched nothing but socks,

boiler of horrible porridge—

climb back onto the cake-mix package,

look brisk and competent, the way you used to—

If only we could call you—

Here Mom, Here Mom—

and you would come clip-clopping

on your daytime Cuban heels,

smelling of sink and lilac,

(your bum encased in the foundation garment

you’d peel off at night

with a sigh like a marsh exhaling),

saying, What is it now,

and we could catch you

in a net, and cage you

in your bungalow, where you belong,

and make you stay—

Then everything would be all right

the way it was when we could play

till after dark on spring evenings,

then sleep without fear

because you threw yourself in front of the fear

and stopped it with your body—

And there you’ll be, in your cotton housecoat,

holding a wooden peg

between your teeth, as the washing flaps

on the clothesline you once briefly considered

hanging yourself with—

but forget that! There you’ll be,

singing a song of your own youth

as though no time has passed,

and we can be careless again,

and embarrassed by you,

and ignore you as we used to,

and the holes in the world will be mended.

III.

HORATIO’S VERSION

Absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story…

These were Hamlet’s last words to me. Well, almost the last. I didn’t know at the time that this wasn’t a request but a command—in effect, a clever and twisted curse. I would be doomed to stay alive until I did tell the story. Which is why you are reading my own words, in this very newspaper, today.

Yes, this is Horatio speaking: friend, confidant, ear-for-loan, eternal bystander at the festivities and debacles of the great and bloodthirsty. I have to say that I did my best as second banana during the Elsinore affair. I listened to Hamlet’s outpourings, which at times bordered on lunacy; I sympathized; I offered what I hoped was sage advice. And then I got stuck with cleaning up the not inconsiderable mess.

Or not so much cleaning it up: wrapping it up. I was supposed to set down the events truthfully, as they had occurred, though showing Hamlet in a more or less favourable light, the light that shines on every protagonist. I hoped to wring some poetry out of these events, darkish poetry it would have to be. Perhaps I could add some philosophical musings about the human condition. I also hoped to come up with a plausible resolution to the story.

But what was the story? It was a tale of revenge, that much was clear. A wrong had been done, or it appeared to have been done. Hamlet said, as I recall, “O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right,” or something like that. But through morose dithering combined with sudden rash actions, he ended up killing quite a few more people than ought to have been killed, even according to the rather loose guidelines of honour as then constituted.

This often happens, as I’ve observed during the course of my now entirely too-long life. The Hatfields and the McCoys go at it, turn and turn about, until no one’s left standing. Countries are similar. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” I have often said while standing deliberately in the line of fire during these small, medium, and large payback events, but few have ever listened to me. An eye for an eye is their idea. A head for a head, a bomb for a bomb, a city for a city. Human beings—I’ve observed—are hot-wired for scorekeeping, and since they like to win, they’re always going one better than the other fellow.

Excuse me. Not one better. One more.

I started out well enough at the outset. I found a fresh piece of parchment, I ground some ink. Once upon a time there was a well-meaning but knotted-up prince called Hamlet, I wrote. But that didn’t sound quite right. Then I thought I might do it as a sort of play. Elsinore. A Platform before the Castle, I wrote. Then I dried up.

Trouble is, I started thinking about the story behind the story, which was not that Claudius had murdered Hamlet the Elder, but that Hamlet the Elder had murdered another king called Fortinbras. Well, not murdered exactly: slain in single combat, thus getting hold of a wad of Fortinbras territory. But the upshot of all of Hamlet Junior’s machinations was that he himself ended up dead and Fortinbras the Second got hold of everything—not only his father’s lost lands, but all of Hamlet’s lands as well.