The English language is a play with a cast of thousands,
every word an actor. Tonight the play stars Loving Kindness,
the actor Love upstages Affection and Lust.
How different the actor Silence at the Old Vic
from Tartuffe’s Tranquille at the Odéon.
Dame Maybe mouths the actor Perhaps behind the scrim.
In the play Watchman, he or she waits 7 years
for the return of a Greek or Latin word,
still useful in 5th Act English death scenes.
I weep when a friend and my dogs die,
not at the death of Hamlet.
The word History is a ham.
English performs Forever slapstick that leads
to Saxon and Norman morality plays
staged on a wagon pulled by oxen—
the faithful in brick and blue stone churches
listen to choirs, Georgian chants and madrigals.
I salute Guido D’Arezzo,
who invented musical notation
because singers failed to remember Gregorian chants,
a new technique for teaching ut-re-me-fa-so-la,
a mnemonic. May Apollo bless Guido D’Arezzo
who gave humanity a universal language.
Shankar’s sitar understands English and French horns,
Louis Armstrong trumpets and sings: every note
is full of suffering and joy, Black and Blue.
The actor Dream, embraces the actresses
Past, Moment, and Future. In the pit, standees
see Dream and his ladies as synonyms.
The actresses Dame Pardon and Cough kiss and dream in tongues.
Dream, in an aside, says, “The cast of words swallows
rhyme and meter, little fish swallow big fish.
Nothing has come to Something,
you remember Nothing will come of Nothing.”
* * *
English will live when the universe is a galaxy
of dead volcanoes and black holes.
The last words spoken
trippingly on the tongue by a player,
will most likely have to do with trade,
like Socrates’ “We owe a cock to Asclepius.”
I owe the Gods everything.
What did the wise illiterate do?
He drew pictures in warm sand, he noticed poets
were bricklayers who built a castle in Santes Creus,
signed each brick. Time flies like a hummingbird,
stands still as a mountain.
397 BC, the city-state of Athens
lost 1/3 of its beauty loving male citizens
at the Battle of Syracuse on land and sea—
those not spiked were drowned, enslaved.
Athenians, all with geometry and philosophy,
were chained together to work in marble quarries,
often they were dragged into the theater
to stand in the chorus without rehearsal,
it was given they would know by heart
the plays of Euripides to the end.
The Chinese still brush metaphors:
a giant turtle holds on its back the revolving world.
Turtles and the phoenix command:
Change your metaphor!
An apple orchard is an epic theater,
a play against war and bargaining too much,
too long for the life of your son,
while The Cherry Orchard, far from Moscow,
tells the story of a rural society changing.
Before the last curtain, the audience hears
malcontented peasants cutting down trees.
Chekov presents the problem without solution,
he notes in his diaries: “My plays are comedies.”
I cheer for English—comedy, tragedy, pastoral,
spoken by puppets or fingering shadows on walls
around the world. A beautiful woman says,
“Meet me backstage in my dressing room.
But if you see the play only on your cell phone,
throw that smart phone into the Thames.”
A change of scene: Sir River Mud and Lady Gwendomere
perform The Drowned Book.
Then a surrealist Nativity: after a cold coming,
the Magi bring the Christ child a two-volume OED,
a miracle before there was English.
In the stable, a donkey, a Jew, eats words,
the cow of Christianity moos the Beatitudes,
the Book of Psalms holds up the sagging walls,
the leaking roof. Life is not a dream, it’s a play.
