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R.G. Cantalupo

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Hamlet (An Explanation)

For me, he was always more than just a princely player
on a stage, an actor who walked off after the performance

to become a man again. No, his father’s voice followed me
from New York to California as if it were my own.

I heard it like a boa slithering over burnt grass,
constricting for revenge, saw my shadow running

into my mother’s bedroom with a knife. After the war,
I saw his ghost like gone buddies--bodiless, see-thru

as a pane--stalking the walking shadows outside my bed,
and Ophelia, Ophelia mad with the madness swirling

inside me--to love or not to love asked again and again
like the scratched line in a song. And later, (I myself old

as a king), my own father. (who’d slept in Potter’s Field
twenty-odd years), would call out for me to save him,

and sad Ophelias would come and go and come again
unable to solve my pain. Now my father stands beside me

in the mornings. Sometimes he has my face. Sometimes
I have his. His skin is the color of letters I’ve saved,

his tongue like the tongues of many shoes I’ve worn
from seven or so till now, his speech faint as this

offshore breeze roaming thru the canyon, this legacy of
steps and unfinished labor. For years now he’s been painting

the Sistine chapel in my dreams so that I, ever the son,
wake bone-weary, bleary-eyed, unsure of what I’ve envisioned,

my past lives half-remembered, the task I came for
undone, the question not of being, but of not having been--

 

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