their caregivers
at home, keeping the normalities,
she and Wayne
sit alone at the top of the bleachers
investigating.
What is the
difference, they ask,
their mentors
pondering the time being,
between an era
and an age?
Is this a
question for history or anthropology?
Or sociology?
It is too
obvious, of course, they say,
their peer
groups yearning, maturating,
to propose that
we are in an age of technology.
And it is
inaccurate to refer to an age of Freud
or of
Christianity, for instance,
since they have
currency only in the western sphere
and may be
dwindling in acceptance.
We might appropriately
term them merely eras.
Classicism, they
declare, is an age,
their kinfolk
puttering, lolling, dithering,
romanticism was
an era,
cubism a fad.
Tasting rutabaga
would be a whim.
An era starts
with a Mendel,
a Gutenberg, a
Philosophe,
an Alexander
Graham Bell.
Imagine Capitol
Square at this moment, they exclaim,
their milieu
grudgingly administering to itself,
their mores
uncertain of its motives,
with all these
ages, eras, fads, whims
in process at
once,
some in absurd
conflict.
THE BUCOLIC, THE
PERILOUS
We are
reasonably confident that Shakespeare
was born in
Henley Street.
That
occasionally comforting shadows, odors,
auras recurred
in his earliest awareness.
That various
Freudian phenomena were at work.
That other
infants in the neighborhood
suggestively
resembled a newborn Sophocles
or a puling
George Bernard Shaw.
—
Whatever they
said to his childhood,
there to the
south were the farmlands,
where some of
his kin remained,
to the north was
the Forest of Arden,
where more
relatives lived in the villages.
The Avon flowed
forever by.
Every day his
father went with the ruling elite,
the spiders made
their webs in the hedges,
a clamor came
from the smithy,
the
slaughterhouse, the market stalls.
He was an
eyewitness to wrath, spite, gluttony,
overheard rumors
about the queen,
went to grammar
school,
received
impressions of the elms,
the fine stones
of Clopton Bridge,
the privacies of
the houses—
absorbing the
available spectacle,
not unlike,
perhaps, a youngling Plautus
or an incipient
James Barrie.
—
Now he began, at
the age of fourteen,
his shadowy,
probably wayward,
possibly
delinquent, possibly canny years —
fourteen more,
to be precise.
The evidence is
sparse and conflicting.
His father’s
financial and political fortunes,
seldom stable,
went into severe decline.
William left
school, never to return,
took up various
menial occupations,
as the legendry
goes.
Married at
eighteen,
soon christened
three children.
Then virtually
disappeared
until we find
him, aged twenty eight,
appearing on a
London stage,
having been in
the city for a time
and/or touring
with troupes of players.
The rest the
world knows.
—
This might be an
episode, we reflect,
out of Molière
or Tom Stoppard.
But who would
leave it at that?
Who would not go
up to bucolic Stratford,
put on his
Warwickshire dialect,
and stroll with
him all over an adolescent night
to hear what was
obscurely stirred
by his memories
of Ovid, the mystery plays,
the balladeers
at the September fair?
Of swallows
whirling about the chimneys?
Of winter, a
mulberry tree, government spies?
Who would not
contrive a visit
with his mother,
with Anne Hathaway?
Would not pursue
him to perilous London,
to lowlife
Shoreditch and a theater where,
multitudinous,
his sensors alert to the business,
to the fellows
Marlowe and Kyd,
to his alteregos
and all human intent,
he is acquiring
credentials?
Not buy him a
meal,
roister with him
and the stagehands,
to learn
somewhat more of why
he would not
write a Blithe Spirit,
a Look Back
in Anger,
a Waiting for
Godot?
FATE
his alterego
is intemperate
hubristic
—
his occupation
legal
scholarship
is to him
insufficient
repressive
—
his musicality
is visceral
rhapsodic
importunate
—
his piano
a baby grand
is black
elegantly rigid
on its three
legs
complacently
reminiscent
of the dulcimer
Bartolomeo
Cristofori
Johann Sebastian
Bach
Franz Liszt
utterly
impassive
day or night
until palpated
caressed
incited
—
his digital dexterity
is unexceptional
an impediment
his two leftmost
fingers
adamantly inept
FACES, BEARINGS,
NAMES
Here are some of
their houses,
representative
folks,
wearing the
faces they use behind doors,
expendable,
auxiliary persons
with deft hands,
nonetheless,
and genes for
public spiritedness.
Some of the
unfit parents,
some of the
pilferers,
the
misanthropes, the pornographers
have been to
college,
been to Viet
Nam,
on jury duty, on
the realty board.
Individuals with
personality disorders
cross lives
with people of
charismatic instability.
One of the
habitual polluters,
with one of the
commonest names,
has a bearing
from a golden age.
Oliver Rice's poems
have appeared widely in journals and anthologies in the United States, as well
as Canada, Argentina, England, The Netherlands, Austria, Turkey, and India. An
interview with Creekwalker was
released by that zine in January 2010. His book of poems, On Consenting to
be a Man, is offered by Cyberwit, in
Allahabad, India, and is available on Amazon. His online chapbook, Afterthoughts,
Siestas, will appear in Mudlark late this fall.
