While Playing Hamlet at the National Theatre, Daniel Day-Lewis Leaves the Stage, Having Seen the Ghost of His Own Father
A poem for Sunday
He does not return: not to the evening’s performance, where his understudy gains a standing ovation, & not to the theater, where the treasonous stage is made for turning one place into Ten men become an army, halved coconuts a cavalry; the absence of vastness & sky is transformed into vastness & sky: field, forest, cliff, sea, a castle & its ramparts: A metaphor, then: how he collapsed, his long body his own again & folded into three parts, like a letter. — —What is he doing here, in Elsinore? The planks of the London stage grow cold beneath the actor’s face. merely meant to , until Shakespeare gave the word to all the dead. They frequent us, a favorite pub my head. And when my head is gone?
