Will and Testament

 

“Now is the winter of our discontent”--the immortal launch to Richard III in the imagination of one William Shakespeare. I’d sell my birthright for the chance to study that play again with you and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at good ol’ Wittenberg U. Remember that seminar, Horatio? We debated for hours how the hostile hunchback held so much allure in his almost win of the War of Roses. History--or was it literature?--swept him away like a rose of May who didn’t have a chance to see the summer.

 

My truest friend, I write to you in early April, shivering through a spring snowfall. Like the cemetery buds around me, I’m uncertain what to do. ‘To bloom or not to bloom,’ I can hear you tease--well, it’s rather like that, even on the other side. I happen to be on this side, too; for one reason or another, my voice hasn’t passed away.

 

Neither has Ophelia’s. God, I wish I’d been better, listened, learned. You were there, Horatio--the lone survivor--when she said, “we know what we are, but know not what we may be.” In complete lucidity. I must own a portion of her downfall and also rise to her actual orisons. As yet, inward mope I tend to be, I haven’t sought her out. But I shall. This undiscovered country is open to discovery, though not if one refuses to uncoil.

 

I was always known for words, words, words. Remember my gem: “If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come--the readiness is all.” Ahh, Horatio, why didn’t you stop me in my stride? What ‘readiness’ was I referring to, eh? My father--or his ghost, for goodness sake--found me “apt”. Good. I’ll take that into my next aptitude exam and pass it to my chances of promotion!

 

To you I offered this final word: “silence”. Forgive me for its implication of the ‘silent treatment’, for which, ironically, I cannot seem to shake. On the other hand, I wonder if I meant that word to usher in a peace like that of Walden, Eastertide, audience to those who sing against being shouted out. That is Ophelia again, and remembrance we tend to forget.

 

So, ‘silence’ is well and good--I won’t retract that final word. Yet as I shuffled off my mortal coil, I heard Fortinbras in forceful grace. “Go,” he said, as equal invitation and command. Go further, farther, forward, back, in time and space and stuff we haven’t scienced yet. I offer you, Horatio, these stanzas in that vein:

 

            the rest is…

 

Go, go, Horatio,

more Roman than

a Dane, to hasten your philosophy

and tell this tale again,

to witness what cannot be seen

and feel and smell the loam

that we become.

 

Go, go, Horatio,

horizon to a sun,

the oxygen to feed the spark

of work that’s never

done, the law’s delay to coincide

with frozen conscience,

when it comes.

 

Go, go, Horatio,

golden in your faith

as a retriever to this shell-of-self

Great Dane, who will remain

a knave within a play of pardon

if you can, from grave

to kingdom come.

 

 

Keep orating, my friend, now that you are disembodied from the limits of the globe. Our paths will cross as occasions come and go, as divinity shapes our ends and recreates our fits and starts. Now is the spring of our immeasurable content, for literature classes and beyond.

 

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2021)