On Hamlet’s flute old bones of Elsinore
shook and shuckered up the graves
they died and dyed the earth in.
With chaps on stops, chapfallen teen
in weatherbell black taunts uncle, friend,
and motheraunt—a rumspringed Jocasta.
“With a carved thing I’ve driven you up
and with a carved thing I’ll drive you
back down.” Springs and stops go
like Loki to his sons—animal call,
an imitative call. Like one to love
is a screw, rejoindering a passagedoor
to the knave, shut and shuttered
for one quarter of a quintery, made to
skull again with the forefinger dark
and the purple-pinkpout lips of princes.
Is dark dark with no splotch? And is
light light with no speck? Sound sound
with no late grype of cabinet doors?
Life life with no battered blood-bodkin?
The craftsman in the city made this
made a deathbone. Things promised
and privies whistled.
Photo by Andriy Nestruiev on Unsplash
