we’re always asking ourselves
why this young man is so intense.
there’s something about him
that’s more than what he seems.
the play ends and you have a sense
of something unfinished.
as if it were a step
in an obscure initiation.
how confined that world seems,
as if elsinore were an alchemical
vessel where all the heat
of those passions served only
to transform the inner temperature
of some subterranean event.
but he’s not what he is.
the world he’s enclosed in
is only part of a long journey.
part of an ongoing process.
do you know the next stage?
it might be written in a hundred years;
perhaps it’s been composed
already: a novel, a poem,
a painting whose meaning
always eludes us till
we approach the figure
at the threshold.
can’t escape the feeling
of the unfinished.
that death ends nothing. why?
nothing is diminished.
because another death
is referred to, not the death
of one person, with a name
and a history, but another death,
we must pass through
on the way to a mysterious
light. but how like a phase
in the great work it feels,
not calcination, with its black
earth and its skull,
but something further down
the liminal process,
like fermentation, where a deep
change has begun, the intellect
awoken, the soul coming out
of its coarse material shell,
to glimpse the infinite heavens