This guy I know, Joseph (Joe) Graves, is an actor, a scriptwriter, a poet, and a movie-maker. For several years now he has been teaching in China. Teaching Shakespeare in China. Joe is from Arkansas. The Salic passage (I had to look it up) is the prolonged debate which opens the play about the law that prohibited French women from owning property. For me one of the deeply moving things in the poem is that for all the narrator’s protesting, it is obvious that the searchers have come to the right person. How many people would have even known what they mean?
Nuff said except I suspect the narrator is pretty much Joe and all these events pretty much happened.
A WEIRD, BEAUTIFUL NIGHT WITH SHAKESPEARE IN A CHINESE DINER
(Sometimes when Mongolian students come to Beijing to learn about
Shakespeare, a person can get very confused while being deeply moved.)
Joe Graves
At a table in a darkened café
With the best of all lights threatening
To wake me to importance and shine me out of self,
I eat something strange, gooey and chewy,
Chunks shaped like filthy fingers of lost babies’,
A something that the pretty waitress with her dirty apron
And her gorgeous smile insists is pork.
It can’t be pork! It cannot be anything less
Than horribly Martian, and this I KNOW!
Still I eat it for her sake and for my deprived stomachs’.
Those four brought me here in a place so close
To home it seems impossible for me to have missed
It in five years of cafes, restaurants, holes-in-the-walls
Where all manner of strange things have climbed past my teeth.
It’s good—in the dangerous culinary ways of the exotic.
I like it. But certainly,
And despite all waitressly protestations to the opposite,
It is NOT pork.
After a polite bit, King Henry holds up a sheaf of paper;
The Dolphin smiles in that curious way of the faux French;
Mistress Quickly and Canterbury, two of the sexist Mongolia has to offer,
Watch from left and right with black-burning curiosity.
The King looks nobly around
Then finally says and asks,
In the most sincere of whispery yearns:
“We know this is most important.
Would you now please tell us
What it does mean?”
I take the off-sized, ragged papers and read.
It is the Salique speech from Henry V,
Shakespeare’s great, incomprehensible challenge
To all daring to read and act him.
I think, “Who knows what the fuck it means?”
“Oh, God, kids, King and company, why didn’t you
Choose something easy like Hamlet’s 4th soliloquy,
Or the strangling scene in Othello, or Macbeth’s dagger speech,
Or Cleopatra’s death scene, or even the unplayable
Battles from Troilus and Cressida. Damn near anything
That at least tangentially makes some sort of linguistic sense.
But not the goddamn Salique speech!
As I pause and wonder, King Henry encourages,
“We came by train, three days and nights,
And it is our deepest honor to meet you.
We saw your photos on the web.
We know you know Shakespeare.
We need to know how to say these things.
Will you help us to understand?”
My eyes, as so often they do in China,
Fill up watery and red.
I am once again undone.
Sitting there
(a piece of “pork” stuck in one of my confused front teeth)
In the vast, wonderful presence of genuine Humility.
Three days, by night and light, on train from Mongolia
To know what the Salique speech means,
Because they know it is important.
“Will you help us to understand?”
Echoes above the loud breaking of my too-oft-broken heart.
Will I help you to understand?
Will you rather let me fall to my knees
And worship you?
Will you teach me kind earnestness,
Will you expunge forever from my actory soul
All the vast levels of pretentiousness and pose
It contains and which too often obtain?
Will you be my children, my parents, my God?
Will you learn me strange Pork and honesty?
They wonder at my tears.
I cannot stop them falling.
I am not embarrassed,
Nor do they seem so.
Puzzled maybe, and yet still most tender.
Mistress Quickly asks,
“Are you sad?”
“I am happy”, I say.
“I am happy to meet you all, to have you here.”
I wipe my nose and offer,
“Tomorrow we will learn all that I know
Of what these words in Henry mean.
But tonight I tell you that a part of what they
Mean is this:
“In all the ways of hurt and sickness, of pain and death
Of convolutions and confusions
Of answerless questions and stinging, inexplicable rejections
That the twisted, twisting world has to offer,
Sometimes four people of peace and harmony
Come three days and nights from Mongolia;
Come with challenged English and uncompromised hearts;
Come with torn, dog-eared Shakespeare pages;
Come with perfectly brown skin;
Come with and pristine and glowing souls;
Come with questions that give great answers in the asking;
Come in deepest sincerity and with a tired sacrifice of travel—and
Coming thus to be taught,
Teach rather.”
My speech is lost on them, Salique-like, incomprehensible,
Though sweetly received with quizzical smiles and nods.
I turn away and see in the corner, out of the corner of my eye,
And old ragged Chinese man, smoking a camel, chewing non-pork furiously.
He gives me the thumbs up and gestures for me to come to him.
I do.
(He looks unplaceably familiar in the way Old Oriental Men at times do to me.)
“Thanks for taking the gift, wo de peng you”, he says,
Spitting soft greasy chunks to the floor and blowing smoke quite high.
“What gift?” I ask, “And who are you?”
“Nothing about my eyes that gives me away?” he queries.
I shake my head and turn toward the Mongolian beauties.
They have gotten far away in the way people often will in a movie about time travel,
Smaller and distant.
They talk happily among themselves.
I feel they are somewhere else… or I am.
“Listen, buddy, I don’t have a lot of time.”
The old man’s voice turns me back to him.
“There are some starving kids in Indonesia;
Some bears with big ears going extinct in Russia;
Sparrows dropping like flies everywhere;
And in Portland a thirteen-year-old boy just lost his first girlfriend;
And, and, Christmas is coming…so you see, I just don’t have lot of time.
Damn, this pork is good!”
I wonder just for a moment if maybe it really is pork after all,
The old chink seems so cocksure…
And so familiar.
He spits out some more gristle on the floor and stares at me.
He smiles. It’s wonderful they way he does it.
He offers me a cigarette. I take it and smoke.
I feel an air rush over me, and something like change.
“You sure kicked a lot of pricks”, he muses.
“Long time to get through to you, boy.
Oh, well, I got Jews to tend to;
And Palestinians, and politicians and pornographers, professors and pianists.
I haven’t the time to sit around here chewing the pork with you all day.”
He throws his smoke down and grinds it out with a foot.
I notice he wears sandals and how clean his feet look.
He has perfect toenails. I find that so odd.
When I look up from his feet,
He appears thirty years younger and quite strong.
His teeth are splendid as he grins again.
He stands up. He’s very tall, and he kisses me on the mouth.
“I love you”, he laughs as he sweeps me up in his arms
And twirls me. I feel like a baby, happy and dizzy.
“Kindness compels me”, he chuckles as he puts me down.
“Mongolian kids with a sincere desire to learn about Shakespeare
Make me young again.”
I notice a spot of fresh, wet blood on his shirt,
On the right side, near his ribcage.
The kids have suddenly joined us;
They seem to know him; they speak to him in Chinese.
He speaks back to them in some odd language—
It sounds as familiar as he looks.—
And though I do not know its words,
I know it’s the Salique speech he speaks.
The kids all nod with clarity. They’ve got it. I can tell.
One of them, one of the girls, cries.
He embraces her and when he pulls away,
Some of his blood is smeared on her blouse.
The man has disappeared.
I long for him, acutely.
The girl who cried and has blood on her shirt
Touches me on the arm.
I look at her.
She says,
“That was William Shakespeare.
Didn’t you recognize him?
Don’t you recall all those words he coined?
Don’t you remember how they nailed him to a cross?”
Thanks for posting this, Jack. I’m going to have to take some more time to absorb and ponder, but two things strike me right off: first, the image of strange food climbing past one’s teeth would make this a great poem even if all the other lines were complete nonsense; second, it occurs to me that in other hands, this poem would stop somewhere roundabout the end of the narrator’s speech: epiphany achieved and articulated, we could nod and turn the page satisfied. Take a sip of tea, check our e-mail. So the plunge into strangeness that comes after is risky, but I think ultimately rewarding, in that it seems to represent or even enact what should be, but usually never actually turns out to be, the consequences of the sort of epiphany described earlier on. Instead of just ending with an assertion of grace and wonder, the poem confronts you with something perplexing and wonder-ful. Hm. I think I like it.
I had to print this one out and I’ll have to read it more that a couple times. Beautiful. Touching. It captures that hunger for knowing. That soul search that we occasionally forget and then with a start, taste, and savor, and know that it saves us.
Question? The line “two of the sexist Mongolia has to offer”. Is that a typo or am I misunderstanding due to a lack of Shakespearean savvy?
Wow Jack, that poem was really wonderful. Although it stands alone as a solitary piece of work, evocative of a deep and strange humanity in its own right, I will say as a matter of compliment that it reminds me of a Tomaž Šalamun poem…one where the imaginative and hearty takes place of the rote and sundry…something about eating a golden ticket (Laura Mullen knows which one I’m talking about). Perhaps you do, too.
What is most impressive about this poem is how successfully that sense of humility is established, vis a vis the surreal aspect of the narrative, when our Speaker meets William Shakespeare, a sureality that seems to be the most appropriate reaction to his being so deeply touched.
I am frankly a bit shocked at this—it manages to leap and twist in so many different ways that it left me dizzy. I might love it. Heady and light at the same time.
In the way much good art does, it also forces me to learn. First, to even understand what Salic law even was. Secondly, to read back through Henry V to find the passage. And third, to understand what the passage meant in the heady political context of the play.
All this, and Martian pork and Jesus H. Shakespeare. Perfect. I remember going to the amazing Thai House in Jackson for the first time and protesting that its delicious tofu had to be cut from the body of an animal I’d never happened upon before, but after repeatedly assured by Watt and Tim that it was simple mashed beans, I relented.
Alex: I think, “Man with the Golden Eye.”