The noose tightens. How much for each foot of rope,
each inch of neck, and the boxwood coffin,
who paid for lunch and was drink taken,
and how much to pay the hangman’s wages?
Sir: my business was slow, my cash flow
sluggish, my credit withered long ago,
my only product in these words that light me
dimly through the dark not in much demand.
And I’ve no other skill. Words, figures: cold,
untouchable and abstract, logging receipts, payments,
goods in goods out, plus, minus. I might have been
Reykjavik it will be called, forty years
shivering in the tight mouthed service
of the Northmen, entering and tallying,
and that because I was a boy who wrote.
Meanwhile to one side, late, through the long north light
I write the plot later called Hamlet:
a brother’s poison and a wife’s betrayal,
the son’s dilemma as to vengeance, justice, silence,
and the last act always bloody carnage.
Then back to the profit and the loss
of journeys, dreams, chance encounters
with the other strangers, till all the words
that wondered at the world came down to this:
final demands from the Department of Wishful Thinking,
the bottom line, the exact amount now due
I cannot pay.