Shakespeare

Amid grandees of times Elizabethan you shimmered too, you followed sumptuous custom; the circle of ruff, the silv'ry satin that encased your thigh, the wedgelike beard - in all of this you were like other men... Thus was enfolded your godlike thunder in a succinct cape. Haughty, aloof from theatre's alarums, you easily, regretlessly relinquished the laurels twinning into a dry wreath, concealing for all time your. monstrous genius beneath a mask; and yet, your phantasm's echoes still vibrate for us; your Venetian Moor, his anguish; Falstaff's visage, like an udder with pasted-on mustache; the raging Lear.. You are among us, you're alive; your name, though, your image, too - deceiving, thus, the world you have submerged in your beloved Lethe. It's true, of course, a usurer had grown accustomed, for a sum, to sign your work (that Shakespeare - Will - who played the Ghost in Hamlet, who lives in pubs, and died before he could digest in full his portion of a boar's head)... The frigate breathed, your country you were leaving, To Italy you went. A female voice called singsong through the iron's pattern called to her balcony the tall inglesse, grown languid from the lemon-tinted moon and Verona's streets. My inclination is to imagine, possibly, the droll and kind creator of Don Quixote exchanging with you a few casual words while waiting for fresh horses - and the evening was surely blue. The well behind the tavern contained a pail's pure tinkling sound... Reply whom did you love? Reveal yourself - whose memoirs refer to you in passing? Look what numbers of lowly, worthless souls have left their trace, what countless names Brantome has for the asking! Reveal yourself, god of iambic thunder, you hundred-mouthed, unthinkably great bard! No! At the destined hour, when you felt banished by God from your existence, you recalled those secret manuscripts, fully aware that your supremacy would rest unblemished by public rumor's unashamed brand, that ever, midst the shifting dust of ages, faceless you'd stay, like immortality itself - then vanished in the distance, smiling.