by Ros Barber
allegiance to the Devil.’
He says love!
How stupidly my heart sings at the word,
like a girl sings as she launders her own blood.
‘What kind of dead man are you? Turning up
all over the place. The plan was disappear.’
‘And to all the world I have!’ I stand again,
my lungs craving more air. ‘Except to you.
Perhaps we are drawn together.’
‘By the stars?
By sun and moon? Then I am truly doomed,’
he says, and does seem stricken. ‘Your disgrace
will not be mine.’
I whisper, ‘My disgrace?’
‘It’s said you died blaspheming. That the knife
into your brain was punishment from God
for all those statements in the note from Baines.’
‘But I didn’t die!’ I grip his arm to prove
how alive I am. ‘And the rest is all made up!’
‘The note from Baines was real.’
‘But it was lies!
At least, exaggerations.’
Like a splat
of mud, he shakes me off his arm and stands.
He’s very tall. Willowy, yet more broad.
So young, so splendid. I catch sight of me
in the window’s dusk: a shorter, balding man
whose clothes are slightly crushed, whose older face
is quivering, and shadowed beneath the eyes.
How cruel an instrument, imagination,
to paint me a future where he welcomed me,
offered protection, loved me for my words.
What fiction had I spun to picture him
a greater friend than you, because you left,
because you could not risk my company –
and how did I sell myself this fantasy
with him a titled earl, and more to lose?
‘Forgive me,’ I say. ‘May life be good to you.’
I make for the door, my throat as lumped and tight
as if Eden’s apple chokes me.
‘Wait,’ he says.
His eyes are also brimming. ‘I would like
to give you something dear to me.’ He pulls
open a drawer, extracting a small book.
‘Your friends are working still, to save your name.
Shore up your reputation. This I thought
quite beautiful.’
He hands the book to me
as a nurse would hand a baby to its mother.
So full was I, of taking last goodbyes,
I didn’t read the words upon the cover,
and twilight on the frosty Paris streets
prevented me from knowing what I held
until, in my room, I lit a candle on
this – what can I address it as, but horror?
And dedicated by Ned Blount to you,
who gave my script away for this to happen.
‘HERO AND LEANDER, BEGUN BY CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’
and no. No, no.
‘AND FINISHED BY GEORGE CHAPMAN.’
CHAPMAN’S CURSE
How dull a dead man is. How short on wit.
How absent at the dinner table, too.
How tedious in friendship, how like air
to every sense that used to hold him true.
Dissolved into a fiction of your making,
how unreal I must seem, these days, to you.
The proof sits in my hands. The smallest book;
and yet, between its covers, I am slain.
This poem we agreed I would not finish
until some king brought me to life again,
you have allowed another man to end,
who adds more wordage than the story needs,
alters my structure and destroys the tone,
then dedicates it to your recent bride,
flourishing friendship that I thought my own.
One poet not enough for you, perhaps.
Or this first one so lamed by Fortune’s spite
that you craved other architects of verse,
and seeking my echo in the school of night,
found ghost-eyed Chapman, swaying from the pipe,
fresh from communing with the spirit world.
And he might pass, for he can turn a line
you might develop fondness for, or worse.
Although your heart is still attached to mine,
the difference is that he can come to Kent.
And did you, pray, invite him to complete
the interrupted story of our love,
relinquishing all hope of my return?
Or did you, so convinced of your own fraud,
in the absence of letters agents fail to pass,
begin to believe that I was truly dead
and ask the man to channel me?
I rage
through the dutiful plodding of these stolid lines
Chapman has patched where I would write with fire.
But I don’t blame him. He believes the dead
are guiding him.
But what has guided you?
Has five years in perdition ruined me
and you must plunge me now into the dark?
Or has mere absence puffed your love away
like so much Old Man’s Beard? I understand
how unrewarded longing bursts like song
upon the merest kindness, after years
of knocking its head against the lost and gone –
but you have given up my words, and let
another write my ending. Brother, friend,
how should I read it? Even in Judas’ kiss,
Christ was never more betrayed than this.
BARE RUINED CHOIRS
All in a day, the birds were stripped from trees.
The flowers lost their petals, and their scent
dissolved like an echo of forgotten song.
Yet nothing changed: for any other man
who walked this lane would swear there’s nothing wrong;
not holding in his heart this heavy stone.
The fault lies not in you, not in my Rose,
but in that youth convinced he couldn’t fall:
proud of his swift ascension, scorning Hell,
oblivious to the feathers falling from
the wings he fashioned in his prison cell,
that room above a home-town cobbler’s shop.
Words: he commanded them. Called them his slaves.
Yet the rope that Fate would put around his neck
he wove himself with words too freely spent;
youth’s certainty, a preening arrogance
born out of turning shepherds into kings.
If I could travel back and shake that boy –
no good would come of it. He had a friend
who warned him ceaselessly, said, ‘Hush,’ to jokes
whose laughter came from outrage. Chide me, then,
as Fortune does, for my stupidity.
No massacre occurred. There is no husk
of glory to mourn. No ruin here, but me.
KNIVES
Of course, you are Brutus. Moral, careful man,
persuaded my death is for the higher good.
Chapman perhaps your Cassius, whispering knives.
So many stab me that the blame is lost.
Your blade the last: and my surprise enough
to kill a man not used to shocks. But I,
old hand, am merely robbed of sleep, my brain
wrestling words to make some sense of pain –
burning the stinking tallow, gulping wine,
and scratching another version of this tale.
My cure, the manuscript. The first scene goes
to a rabble-rousing cobbler. You’ll recall
a witty friend once free and sharp as him.
Later a poet’s murdered by mistake,
confused with a
conspirator: his name
condemning him to death. Shall I go on?
I’m already Caesar, whose swift rise was feared,
a conqueror of men, too confident.
Mark Antony, who moulds the crowd with words
to any shape he wishes. Portia too,
the swallower of fire, transparent, true.
Most any part is me, but you play Brutus.
Sleepless counsellor, wisdom’s constant friend:
haunted by ghosts, loved to the bitter end.
CONCERNING THE ENGLISH
Dispatches received by my lord Buzenval, at Antwerp, this year, 1599.
Essex is sent to Ireland. It is said,
in a fierce debate, the Queen had boxed his ears
and his hand, instinctive, touched the hilt of his sword.
Undrawn. But her silence slicing off his head.
Essex sets off with sixteen thousand men.
A four-mile double line of citizens
cheering him and the troops until the sun
gives way to rain and hail. They scatter then.
The largest army ever to set foot
on Irish soil arrives in Dublin close
to St George’s Day. He throws a lavish feast.
The Earl of Southampton’s Captain of the Horse.
Can that gentle face bark orders? Do men ride into battle blinded with their love for him?
The rebels, marched upon, melt into woods
and bogs, know where to ford and how to milk
their native land’s advantage. Essex rides
to empty battlefields. His marchers tire.
The army’s provisions falter. Rebels strip
horses and food from land beyond the Pale.
The Queen stamps feet to hear Essex bestows
copious knighthoods, dwindling loaves of bread.
She sends the order to attack Tyrone
directly, but his force outweighs the troops,
now dwindled to five thousand. Essex has
some ailment now, perhaps a kidney stone.
Essex decides to parlay with Tyrone
against the Queen’s instructions. Rides a horse
up to its belly in the River Glyde
for private conversation. Half an hour.
And so, cessation. All that cost and not
the promised victory. Peace rests on the oath
of a man who can’t be trusted, in a tongue
that slips interpretation like an eel.
In mid-September, sources intercept
an order from the Queen: he must stay put.
On no account must the Earl of Essex leave
Ireland without the Queen’s express command.
I pick up this news in Zeeland. If all hope
for resurrection rests with Essex, this
rage of the Queen adds mortar to my tomb.
He’s falling as fast as I did.
I get drunk
in a back room with two soldiers, wake up bruised
unsure of why or how. My friend, I fear
I’m falling sick again. It’s in my bones:
a deep appalling ache. Each morning leaves
more hair on my pillow as my body fails
to restore itself to health. And then worse news.
September 24th. The earl has sailed
for England.
An act as close to treason as
that twitch for his sword. And two weeks on, a whirl
of gossip. My friend, confirm if this is true:
that the Earl of Essex burst upon the Queen
ungowned, unwigged in her chamber, so intent
on explaining himself, he glimpsed the royal dugs.
That since that day he’s under house arrest
and Cecil entreats Her Majesty to press
a charge of treason. Friend if this is true—
I broke three days, not knowing what that ‘if’
should lead to. Beset with shivering and pain.
Anthony writes: the earl cannot sustain
intelligencers. He is growing debts
as lesser men grow buboes, and the court
whose will he needs to know lies close to home.
My misery, no longer so inert
or held in its place by hope, is moving in;
and others see it in my eyes, I know.
The weather, and bad fortune, weakens me.
It rains five days.
I dreamt of him, the earl,
magnificent, his beard a ruddy spade,
his armour bloody from the battlefield,
about to offer me all that I crave:
my reputation, my identity,
the right to be called Kit Marlowe and be safe.
But as his mouth opened to say my name
what fell out was a fish, another fish,
gag after silver gag of fin and scale
which servants bagged in nets and took away,
and then the earl himself, all shrunken, pale.
No further letter, and no payment comes.
The network of agents I’ve depended on
now falls apart, and I must make my home
wherever I am useful. And away
from incessant rain; the wide, tormenting grey
of the English Channel.
Once or twice this year
I imagined I had seen the Dover cliffs,
and even the dots of samphire pickers there.
But the pickers were gulls, feeding above the sea;
the land a bank of cloud, and not my home.
I long for warmth, and rest; some sanity.
I leave with a mission travelling to Rome.
ORSINO’S CASTLE, BRACCIANO
Spring, and the first flowers of the century
break colour to me gently. There’s a rash
of narcissus running southwards to the lake,
visible even as I lie in bed
in this stony room. It pains me to get up
when I have slept so little. I make lists.
A list of things I might have died without.
My linguist’s tongue. My rapier and knife.
My trunk of books, the lock upon it. Jokes
Tom Watson told me, which I shared with thieves.
Your cloak. Ten angels from the King of France
concealed in the hem of it. Remembered words
from the Bible, Ovid, Virgil’s Ulysses.
A letter of introduction to the Duke
Orsino in the name of William Hall.
A list of Bracciano’s benefits.
The peace to write. A room to settle in.
A view of the lake, and sunlight on the wall.
A climate kind to grapes, and wine as good
as the host who serves it. Somewhere to read books
and not depend on memory alone.
The sense of permanence that comes from stone.
A list of reasons I am still myself.
I write.
I’m writing more, and better than
I could, contented. For the sting in this
prison of circumstance stirs in my blood
more honest wit than comfort ever could.
And as my mouth was stopped, so must my pen
speak volubly, and clear – and cleverer
than those who would be my decipherers.
Those who would have me killed, led by the nose
to a wall that butts them stupid. Those called friends
led through the forest, note by rhyming note,
to find me in my exile. If they would.
Writing the date alarms me. That sixteen
obliterates Kit Marlowe’s century;
the zeros like a slate some hand wiped clean
when I had all my thoughts chalked down on it.
New spring, new century: if these spell hope
to other men, they toll ‘all gone’ to me.
No plan except await news of the Queen
.
Meanwhile my days are sluiced down castle walls
like yesterday’s food; passed through and poisonous.
I’m writing a comedy. Oh, you will like it.
A fairytale, adapted as all tales are.
I’ve added a stupid William, who would woo
and win the love of Audrey-Audience
despite his blunted wit and Cuntry Ways.
There’s a threat for him. And melancholy Jaques
in a tribute to my little friend, Petit.
For me, whose folly made him wise, Touchstone,
by whom base metal can be told from gold,
expounds on the truth and fake of poetry.
And yet, the long nights won’t let go of me.
GHOST
I met me on the stairs. I had an eye
bloodied and scabbed as our poor story told,
and I, or it – there was no human there –
urged me, ‘Revenge! Revenge!’
Startled awake,
I swear the shadows dragged me out of bed
to mix my ink, and tell—
What would I tell?
Kyd’s fishwife tale, written this time from Hell,
with all the suffering that whips me mad
in castellated prose: in tricks and turns,
and watching the dark, and how the candle burns,
and God preserve us from these men of stone,
their murdering of truth.