Ophelia
If we could have heard Ophelia’s voice in all its fullness and anguish, unobstructed by the constraints of Elizabethan society, what would she have said? What did she think was happening to her as her mind unspooled toward madness? This chapbook gives us Ophelia in her own voice, speaking in prose poems about her estrangement from Hamlet, the loss of her father, and the unbearable hurt these events bring. Borrowing sometimes from Shakespeare’s idiom, sometimes inventing a hybrid language of their own, these poems conclude that even when approaching death, one wants the bubbles of unreason to “stay.”
Excerpt
Who can say what the soul is? A bell has a soul. A bell is a bird with a call like thunder or the thin, tingling whisper of snow. Most moments, its clapper hangs in shame of speech, capped in a rigor of bronze to becalm birdcall or binge by a darkness would muffle our God. Ah, but what does God hear when belfry bangs out song bad enough to our lowly earth-ears? A soul has a bell. Something of a person to join in joyous ringing. Birds of our throats. We fly, we float, given music. Our voices forget us. They exist whole only in God. Go to, go to, he told me. Or his soul said, Go home. To the silence. To death’s chapel of bells.