A Circle in a Lake, Plus Six
A Circle in a Lake: Writings while Reading the Collected Works of William Shakespeare
Plus Six
Collected Writings May 1-September 5 2011
For Jim Cohn: For over thirty years, my confederate
When I listen to them now (early demos I recorded on an afternoon in a studio in 1964 and haven’t heard since and had forgotten they existed) I know how little I have changed and how many similar stories are told in my later songs. That love is changeable, that you cannot pin anything or anyone down in this world—and if you try it mostly won’t work. I still feel the same, a little suspended in a life that has turned and twisted in many unexpected ways, some good, some not so good, but always and always and still filled with hope.
—Vashti Bunyan
allotrion: an idle pursuit that distracts from serious responsibilities
Shakespeare was 46 when the King James Bible was written. In Psalm 46 of that work, the 46th word from the first word is “shake” and the 46th word from the last word is “spear.”
A Circle in a Lake
Table of Contents
Henry VI, Part I (1591)………………………………………………………………………….5
Henry VI Part II (1590)………………………………………………………………………….6
Henry VI, Part III (1590)…………………………………………………………………………6
Richard III (1592)………………………………………………………………………………..7
Venus and Adonis (1592)………………………………………………………………………..8
A Comedy of Errors (1592)………………………………………………………………………9
Love’s Labour Lost (1594)………………………………………………………..……………10
Romeo and Juliet (1594)………………………………………………………………………..12
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595)………………………………………….……………….13
The Sonnets (1592-1595)……………………………………………………………………….15
Merchant of Venice (1596)……………………………………………………………………..15
Much Ado about Nothing (1598)……………………………………………………………….16
As You Like It (1599)…………………………………………………………………………..17
Twelfth Night (1599)……………………………………………………………………………20
Merry Wives of Windsor (1600)……………………….……………………………………….23
Troilus and Cressida (1601)…………………………………………………………………….23
All’s Well That Ends Well (1602)………………………………………………………………24
Measure for Measure (1604)……………………………………………………………………25
Plus Six
For Karen Dalton……………………………………………………………………………….26
Ring Composition, First Movement……………………………………………………………26
Ring Composition: Interlude………………………………………………………………… 29
Ring Composition: Third Movement: Chiasmus…………..…………………………………..29
Ring Composition: Fourth Movement: Shiva’s Ghats in Kathmandu……………………..30
Walking Home from an Homage to Stan Brakhage at the University of Colorado, Boulder,
April 5, 2011……………………………………………………………………………30
Not printed in an unlimited edition and available for free
to friends and others for Christmas, 2011. Some assembly required.
This is number _________________
Henry VI, Part I (1591)
stichomythy: (a form of dialogue originating in Greek drama in which
lines are uttered by alternate speakers)
She:
Such a sorry thing,
dependent, suckled from another
everything it needed, blundering
from one disaster to another.
By discord great things decay
and turn into ruins in a fall so slow
they seem for a moment
to hang in the air, to float.
He:
Much of it is otherwise.
Are you captured by your own invention?
How you think of it determines what it is.
She:
The sum of what we were and what we will be and what we are
is like a stone that’s fallen from heaven, living and decomposing
at once, but to go out as a shower of sparks, no idea of its trajectory,
not aimed at any target, no history or knowledge of its history.
And then expecting answers, lacking any way to prepare
for what we’ve been tossed into, except maybe the way
a stone thrown into a lake becomes without choice
or effort a perfect circle that it can never comprehend.
He:
The wind that moves the barley is unseen.
Only by its effects can it be implied.
This is as we are, bending in the breeze.
She:
There begins the confusion.
He:
Every flower was once a seed in dark underground.
Let there be snow.
It does not mean an end to spring.
Henry VI Part II (1590)
Winter Sunlight
Driving deeper into the clouds
at the peaks a curtain of snow—
in all five directions
a cloak on what summer was—
winter in the mountains
the white of bones, of rabbits
sunlight through the cumulus,
half shadows under the pines—
my reflection in the windshield
between me and what lies ahead.
Henry VI, Part III (1590)
But … we saw our sunshine made thy spring
And that thy summer bred us no increase…. II.ii.163-164
As a swan, evenly matched,
swims against the current,
neither conquered nor conqueror,
the inevitability of losing,
in the days, months, years
I have left of what this is.
Even a marble hand
wears out after almost
sixty years of rain.
All the hours I’ve spent
on a body of work,
that’s the shadow of a life,
crossed-out by
whatever comes next,
not even slowing the tide.
Richard III (1592)
Happiness is the art of never holding in your mind
the memory of any unpleasant thing that has passed.
—The Buddha
At first dash
like a circle in the lake
what I have said is true,
but in my memory books
everything is faced with artifice—
tailored for a story I’ve told
so many times it’s become
a ritual, and what really happened
comes back to me only in dreams—
the shadow of an eagle searches for a mouse
under the snow that covers the stubble
that’s left after harvest.
I stand between my shadow and the sun.
I am only where I’ve been and what I’ve seen.
I step into wherever I’ll be next.
What was I saying? I was in the
middle of a story. I can begin again
if you tell me where I stopped.
The brittle alabaster moon,
I’m not sleeping, a notebook
that once was full of words.
Venus and Adonis (1592)
… mihiflauus Apollo
Pocula Castalia plena minister aqua.
(Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses’ spring.)
—Ovid, Amores
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain, or in dale
graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
—232-234, Venus hitting on Adonis
Her hair gilds the water as she glides,
later spread on a towel to dry
sun glittering gold.
Make use of time, let not advantage slip.
A compact not of fire but of flint.
The sunset begins to glow.
I’m headed into darker waters,
measuring my strangeness
against the stream.
The silver waves icy like shattered glass,
the black swirling chaos, the undertow,
the sharp stars burning in the sky.
A Comedy of Errors (1592)
Driving with my back to the dawn
the yellow tip of sunlight sneaking
into the canyon.
My tires hum on the asphalt.
I follow the highway
obedient as any river is,
knowing that I’m driving nowhere,
knowing that a moment ago
I didn’t know it–
rushing as if behind me
the canyon was blazing,
in this melodrama I’ve imagined.
Love’s Labour Lost (1594)
Vir sapit qui pauca loquitur. (That man is wise who speaks little.)
1. From the Magus to the Petitioner
Let’s look over
the oracle that
you’ve thrown.
I see a rose
at its reddest
and sweetest. I see
lightning at midnight
in a moonless sky—
white, silver, then black.
I see footprints in the sand
erased by rain, a yellow meteor
in an orange sky,
a cloud that both is and is not,
and beams of sunlight passing
through it both lyrical and ornate.
Petitioner: There begins the confusion.
How we uncover the “will be so”
is to understand what came before.
Just so, these bones have been thrown
a thousand times, and there is something
new about the way they’ve fallen every time—
but there is something that is the same.
In this way I see the difference
as the answer to what you’ve asked of them.
It’s something closer to listening than speaking.
But you’re a writer.
It would be like being for a few moments
the scaffolding of a pen directed by another.
If you were a singer it would be
to lift whatever you were given
into song.
What will be is just not here yet,
but it’s visible as a lesser light
behind a greater.
You have consulted an oracle
but you are given only hieroglyphs
that are to you opaque,
yet shine with all you cannot see.
An oracle finds the light behind
the bright obscuring light.
II. The Petitioner Answers the Magus
So, is this the final oracle that caps all the rest?
Or is this the moment for applause
before the houselights rise?
What I will do now I do not know.
Having heard the oracle,
what choice do I have?
The moon disappears
when it cannot see the sun.
That same moon that’s overcome
by the emergency lights
turning the snow outside my window
red then white then blue.
Romeo and Juliet (1594): “… birth, and heaven, and earth, all three do meet / In thee at once….”
What, rouse thee, man! Thy Juliet is alive,
For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead:
There art thou happy. Tybalt would kill thee,
But thou slewest Tybalt: there art thou happy.
The law that threat’ned death becomes thy friend,
And turns to exile: there are thou happy.
A pack of blessings light upon thy back,
Happiness courts thee in her best array,
But like a misbehaved and sullen wench
Thou pouts upon thy fortune and thy love.
Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.
Go get thee to thy love as was decreed,
Ascend her chamber, hence and comfort her.
III.iii.135-147
In the early morning, her white belly.
Love and death have their own formalities.
How often in our triumph we begin our fall,
how often wisdom is glanced at and passed over.
How often a quick bright thing becomes confusion,
cut-glass snow crystals swinging in the sun.
How often portents in the stars or in dreams
foretell what we should have known already.
But the Muse has lately been some other where.
She sleeps or else says nothing.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595)
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact…
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing
A local habitation and a name.
—V: i:7-17
Two lovers one arm
around the other lost,
together in the forest.
Nature is mysterious.
The sky’s simple light
dazzles the mountaintop.
At night she takes off her
dark bracelet and puts on
a necklace of silver and ice.
Lightning bugs and moths, the wild—
honey, apricots, mangos, figs
mountain lions and coyotes,
a copper ring, her red hair,
enough food for three nights,
plunging deeper into the forest.
So this is one way to tell the story,
equivocating, or I could highlight
the sense of the inevitable or the magical,
make joy for a moment overwhelm oblivion,
begin the story over,
this time turning it into song
as if life didn’t already pass too swiftly
and all I’ve accomplished already
is as fleeting shadows cast by something bright,
and then when it’s over I’m asked
to account for what I’ve done, when I think
it’s enough to have accomplished anything at all.
Am I even certain I’m awake now?
My life became my life the way a script
becomes a film–
it isn’t what I imagined
but in one way it’s better
even though it’s almost over—
it exists, something I created out of shadows,
out of what I had left after what I
wanted to be had withered.
But what a dream it was!
Above the mountains
the belt of stars came into view–
while I, afraid of bears this close
to the river, lit a fire, stirring it,
half asleep, my arm around her waist.
I cannot report how we got here, really.
The trail has melted with the snow
and turned into clouds.
The disappointments are darker
than anything I was prepared for
by comedy, purgatario or nightmare.
The brightest things take their brightness from the sun,
yet darkness falls every evening and half the world
descends into incomprehensible confusion.
Seasons upend the seasons they succeed—
events occur without explanation and the
impossible is as common as the happenstance.
To almost go too far to find my way back,
a clown, a puzzled prophet,
a bewildered cow.
The Sonnets (1592-1595)
The red glow of a manuscript in the fireplace,
red waves erasing everyone and everything
I’ve written on the page, stirring the embers,
restive, the ash drifts upward, as if life
was a riddle that had been puzzled out,
or something simple, like a look in a mirror,
dreaming of things I’ve since forgotten,
remembering what I was other than the writing,
the hills silvered-over, yellowed fields, the sun
reduced to an amethyst hung around my neck.
But to wear this world out to the end. Nothing
stands to the scythe as I do now.
Merchant of Venice (1596)
I put her to sleep with a lullaby,
praise her with a hymn, wake her with a love song,
fall asleep with my arm around her waist.
The moon is above us, but it’s hidden by a cloud.
And now that it’s almost morning
I wish the dark would last a little longer.
The best I can do is remember the way it is
with music, with what is transitory and imperfect.
Much Ado about Nothing (1598)
“I was not born under a rhyming planet….”
Abandoned by love then restored to love again—
the entire curve from ordinary to extraordinary
and back again.
What shatters is what’s false.
We are kept in darkness, perhaps
for our own good.
There is a release from everything.
When she sleeps she becomes a raven
and flies over the cypress to the sea.
Sunlight falls on the lake,
lifted by the winds into the sky,
silver-blue tinsel sailing past a cloud.
All of life is like water in a sieve,
a blend of grey and frost and storm.
That is my conclusion, although I admit
it’s a little narrow. But think not
of the end of time. Let the stars
for their little lives dance.
As You Like It (1599)
Touchstone: The truest poetry is the most feigning.
I.
The sadness, knowing that I have much of my father in me,
his spirit strong in me, but not like him I wandered off
in search of a distant world which continually receded
until I was far into the desert. How long will it take
to make my way back when all I can hear is broken music,
my thoughts hardened into mesas willing to be visible
in exchange for immobility, while I’m distracted
by anything that’s a kind of ember, like a winter
morning’s ice in the air, rough winds from the north,
too much all at once or nothing at all, to have seen too much
to hold any one thing, as rain overfills fountains and smoke
overflows a chimney, a green gilded snake escaping from
the sun under a bush, pouring into one glass what I am
emptying from another—being as I am my father’s son.
II.
Rosalind: A traveler. By my faith, you have great reason to be sad. I fear you have sold your
own lands to see other men’s. Then to have seen much and to have nothing is to
have rich eyes and poor hands.
Jaques: Yes, I have gained my experience.
Rosalind: And your experience makes you sad. I had rather have a fool to make me merry
than experience to make me sad—and to travel for it, too. Farewell, Monsieur
Traveler. Look you lisp and wear strange suits, disable all the benefits of your own
country, be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making you that
countenance you are, or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola.
I use words to express
the silence they destroy,
to lift them into song.
It’s hard to live as if life
is elsewhere, or that this comedy
is imaginary or tragic by design.
I call that into question—it’s an art of lies
and all that word implies of fabrication
and artifice. My vision of poetry is
mountain rain and snow
carried by a river
back into the sea.
III.
Touchstone: Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?
Corin: No more but that I know the more one sickens the worse at ease he is; and that he that
wants money, means, and content is without three good friends; that the property
of rain is to wet and fire to burn; that good pasture makes fat sheep; and that a great
cause of the night is lack of the sun; that he that hath learn’d no wit by nature, nor art,
may complain of good breeding, or comes of a very dull kindred…. Those that are
good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behavior of the
country is most mockable at the court.
Being mortal, it’s a short life
in every way that we go through it alone
or together, until we can go no farther.
I wish it was not one quarter
autumn and one quarter winter,
but that’s how the story goes.
What a life this is. Was.
All things are savage here.
Nothing is wasted.
I stand alone
in the full stream of the world.
I take it all on.
Twelfth Night (1599)
He:
When we cease to grieve for what is dead
our memory becomes a raft at sea,
we lose our way in the everyday,
travelers who set out for Arden
we find ourselves in a nightmare
different from those who stayed behind,
altered into a version of ourselves—
a romance turned into a tragedy,
bartering the mythical for the strange,
for everything we have left behind,
the confusion, the not returning
to the places where we came from,
leaving it more or less as we found it,
yielding to the current without trying
to escape, waiting to see what time will bring,
listening as if the silence is about to break into poetry.
And then it’s over. Sober, everything vanishes
without understanding any of it—
the world between the world of fiction
and the one of fact.
She:
The evening has worn on.
Everyone is drunk and
living out their imaginations,
the detailed voyage of the anecdote
more important than its port,
in a war against time
and human forgetfulness.
He:
There will be no awakening from this dream.
It is the task of the song to teach us this,
to build a bridge to what is for all of us
for all time, the eternal that’s behind
what’s apparent, sweetened if we can by music.
But even operas must come to an end.
The death of what is by no means dead today,
as in summer there is an excess of sun,
or a bank of violets is a symbol of spring—
or after harvest the field becomes a pasture of snow.
She:
What is inconstant does not mean it’s less
or shouldn’t encourage us. If one thing breaks
there is another that will hold—
a compact not of flint, but of fire—
the way stars shine overhead
but not the ones on maps.
II.
Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?
—II.iii.114-116
Remember me,
for I am already
forgotten. But
there is a thread—
if you follow it
you will come to
what I wove out of the
bones I was given—a shrine
to a melancholy god,
whose mind is an opal,
a blank that revolves
as the constellations spin.
Nothing that is so is so.
There is no way out. But
how hollow the somewhere else,
the undertow that runs inside the stream.
My house is dark,
I cannot find it.
As a howling after music
what is it if this be so?
Born in one moment
and then almost instantly
at the other end. But what’s
to come is still uncertain.
My mind is hungry as the sea,
beyond what’s true and the improbable
nothing that is so is so.
Well, this is what I made
with the paper and crayons
I was given.
How can this be tolerated,
this howling after music?
Merry Wives of Windsor (1600)
Honi soit qui mal y pense: Evil to him who evil thinks.
Playing with words,
becoming by the end more of a question.
The story beyond the stories
is a Phoenix born of ashes,
the scent of corpse on its wings,
bleached and ragged linens flapping,
the first cry as it rose like the silver cheeks of fish
bursting through the surface of a pond
the way their underwater shadows flit,
as if pursuing what they’re unable to escape.
Troilus and Cressida (1601)
They say all lovers, swear more performance
than they are able, and yet reserve an ability that
they never perform; vowing more than the perfection
of ten, and discharging less than the tenth part of one.
They that have the voice of lions and the act of hares,
are they not monsters? —III, ii, 84-89
To learn how to continue
to function when you’re broken
is how it goes from here,
to leave behind the promises
of an incomprehensible god.
Troy burned in this kind of silence,
and in the smoky morning after
the victors slaughtered a goat,
not knowing their journey
was not half over yet.
All’s Well That Ends Well (1602)
Love all, trust a few, / Do wrong to none.—I.i.64-65
Everything has a reason
but sometimes it’s ambiguous.
It’s hard to convince with intellect alone—
there must be some exuberance in it.
An idea is a matter of words alone,
a shadow, the name not the thing.
Then more by accident than
on purpose language becomes fact
and behind the story
the real gradually fades away.
I want something tangible and significant—
not the transparent language of fables
or what vanished long ago,
nor what is not yet here–
death with its smoke and shadows
is not that far away.
Life alone is life—
I cannot comprehend the rest.
Knowing I will never understand
should I put what I’ve written in the fire?
It might be best, silence what I was
after, after all.
And “All’s well that ends well yet,
Though time seems so adverse and means unfit.”
Measure for Measure (1604)
This news is old enough, yet it is every day’s news.
A scar is carved by a life that’s lived hard—
a terminus, something that makes sense.
No one knows enough to be certain
in a world where the ordinary
is transformed into the extraordinary
and back again—as in heaven
as on earth, and back again
and always in the midst of some transformation.
Why do I do all of this writing—
like a lion in a cave, cut a little,
I bleed–my verse thunder more than lightning,
sometimes illuminating the dark by accident
if heaven provides, or recovering what has been
if not. Nothing ever goes the way it’s planned
and since it is so, there is some anticipation
to see how it goes—glimpsing for a second
what’s behind it, since it is
heaven everlasting.
For Karen Dalton
Note: The singer Karen Dalton lived in Boulder and the mountains above Boulder between 1960-1962. Bob Dylan wrote of her in Chronicles: “My favorite singer in [New York City in the early Sixties] was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky, and sultry. I’d actually met her before, run across her the previous summer outside Denver in a mountain pass town in a folk club. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it.” “All of us in the Bad Seeds are huge Karen Dalton fans,” writes Nick Cave in the 2006 re-issue of “In My Own Time.”
Why do you think you have to sing so loud? If you want to be heard,
you have to sing softer.—Karen Dalton
Fred Neil, Speaking at Her Service
Note the clearing she’s made
so she can move it this way
and then in a different direction
the way you would if you were actually speaking,
until the melody becomes something in the words themselves,
and the music becomes transparent like snow
that lands on a raven, living on the edge
in two states at once, but headed toward dissolution
looking up into the unknown, all candles burnt out,
but in the early morning light the landscape is restored
as more light grows, and the darkness is eclipsed.
When you first see the mountains,
they look small, and then they grow slowly.
She liked that sense of space in her songs as well
and made room for harmonies others would sing.
Her songs were paintings made from life.
She expressed her feelings the way
she wanted her feelings to be expressed.
She would sometimes find herself in situations
where somebody could hear her, but oftentimes
she couldn’t even do that. If she told me she’d written
my songs herself, I would have believed her.
She fled to the mountains for the winters,
taking a turn for the bluish.
When you go out to the edge you might not
make it all the way back. At times I turned off the radio
not wanting to hear her sing at all.
Not being famous was not her fault.
No one seemed to know what she was on about, and then
after years that felt like centuries she took off for oblivion,
with no idea that she would ever be of interest to anyone,
like teenage poetry in the back of a drawer,
one of the beautiful no-ones who ever truly lived.
Ring Composition: First Movement
In Veranasi the eldest son carries his father
on his shoulders, stepping carefully down
the steep and dusty steps, the corpse board
tilted dangerously toward the Ganges,
toward an open granite slab, silver-grey
smoke from the slab beside it, its corpse
ashes now, poked with a stick, gathered
to be thrown into the river, along with all
its pleasures and remorses—its wasted opportunities—
whose end was written before it began.
After sunset it’s like a housefire except the mourners
aren’t hurrying they’re shuffling silhouettes,
hunched away from the smoke, wooden boats
ferrying the damned across the river, the grieving
on the shore like something out of Job, and the chanting
from holy books about God’s mysteriousness
to those of us observing, those who have been left behind,
while a few feet above them two vultures hover.
To live beyond a certain age is to become
a branch with a ring for every winter, then all of it
is thrown into a fire by the eldest son, pouring a
handful of sugar to make the fire burn hotter,
the flames licking the windblown pennants
between us and the vultures and the stars.
Whomever we feel ourselves to be
we are not, and at the same time
we are never false, especially when we’re
falling into ashes.
This impermanence poets turn into a victory
or a song, like Charlie Parker would.
Ring Composition: Interlude
If those who are here no longer could choose
I bet they’d choose a moment of suffering,
knowing it would end, how delicious
to fall fully into grief, knowing exactly
how total the loss really is but that
the loss of loss is the worst loss of all.
Ring Composition: Second Movement: Chiasmus (the halfway point in Ring Composition,
denoting the beginning of the return to the beginning)
I am always in motion between what I am
and what I’m about to be, but I’m more
than what the weather has made of me,
I’m in the absolute behind the thoughts themselves
in the unconventional lines of jazz,
one long breath—
not knowing where I’m going
but seeing the labyrinth for what it is
and the spinning wheels.
What will never be finished
cannot be camouflaged or covered over.
But what doesn’t wreck us perfects us,
beats us into ourselves,
not only what we are but what we were and
what happens from this moment until the end,
seen without pity, none,
no starting over, no remorse,
no making right, no silver lining
made transparent by what we’ve
suffered and survived,
like pointing a camera at the sun.
I have no idea where I’m going
or what I hope to accomplish—
I’m doing what is necessary
to be a victor, a champion,
a troubadour, a clown—
a dying moth, a guided missile,
to shout from inside the tomb
refusing to die,
refusing to be silenced.
Shiva’s Ghats in Kathmandu
The artist is the one who fails most gracefully,
the one who dies undefeated and undecided,
writing his way forward, bewildered by it all.
Part of me knows it can’t be otherwise
and yet it’s not enough for me,
driven forward by fate and luck
one’s as easily subject to unluck.
This is just what happens, they tell me,
everything eventually
wears out, destroyed by weather and time,
everything falling over all around us.
We cannot get away from our own destruction.
So I sail from place to place
for refuge as the story unfolds
in all its imperfections,
following the crowds into the electric lights
through the gates and down the steps
as the sky darkens and the sun dissolves.
Walking Home from an Homage to Stan Brakhage
at the University of Colorado, Boulder, April 5, 2011
I follow paw prints on the path,
as snow falls on these words
and makes them swim.