Gary Leising
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The Birthplace
Our guide calls it only the birthplace, in all small caps
like it’s Bethlehem, but it’s only Stratford, and the building
we’re outside of at ten till ten is Shakespeare’s birth home,
preserved and fenced-off, interpretive-center-guarded,
all National-Trusted-out, cow hair and plaster walls safe
in the grip of chicken-wire, and this is my second trip here,
the last one disappointing because I stood in the room
where the guy who wrote Hamlet and Othello was born
and I was less inspired than when I went to Graceland
or saw Elvis’s guitar at Sun Studios. “That’s Alright,
Mama” rolls through my head while I sip a Starbuck’s
cappuccino in Stratford, wait for the place to open, and tell
one college kid on my tour group how great Twelfth Night is,
and The Tempest, and, oh yeah, King Lear, and he’s nodding
like I’m the first person to tell him about these plays because
I’m talking like I’m the guy who discovered
poor Will, country boy playwright wannabe stumbling in
to cut a scene, drawling, “Are you the Sam Phillips?”
Will’s driving a truck for a living and works nights helping
his old man make gloves. In the studio he does this sneering
thing with his upper lip when he launches into the first line:
Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night! / Comets
importing change of times and states, but I do no more for college boy
because it’s ten, the doors open, and we’re in,
I sprint through the exhibits, past the first folio with a bow,
then outside and to the house itself. Interpreters
in late 1500s garb tell about the wallpaper, the best bed,
and how we knew this was Will’s dad’s house because
in 1529 the old man was fined for leaving a muck pile outside.
What was sixteenth-century muck? My neighbor lets
dead autumn leaves accumulate and freeze then thaw in spring,
ferment in summer, and he never gets fined. Let records
show that. But muck is what I want, so in the “birth room”
where cattle once lowed and John Keats brought myrrh
and wept like a six year-old on day one of school, I ask
the costumed employee for muck. Childbirth, she says, was
difficult, but all natural, and surrounded by friends who had children
and could tell her what would happen. But muck?
Forceps only for emergencies. A new father myself, I imagine
the blood and afterbirth not mentioned, placenta buried
in the garden where now grow roses with names like Juliet, Cordelia,
Miranda… but no Hotspur tomatoes, a name I’d pick in a heartbeat
over better boys or green zebras or—heaven forfend—a juicy
beefsteak. It’s the blood I think of now, how much
the birthing mother must have lost, how the irregular floorboards
beneath my feet must have leaked and John may have been
downstairs, hearing William’s first cries, Mary’s great exhales,
while blood of parturition dripped then poured onto his best bed.
Halloween Party
My tall red-head grad school friend insisted
she go as Sylvia Plath, I as Ted Hughes. I wore
an old black tie, faded black sport coat, too much
greasy-something-product in my hair. She wore
an impeccably-researched 1963 London-style dress.
No one guessed who we were supposed to be,
so when someone asked, she’d run to the kitchen,
kneel down, put her head inside the oven, and say,
“Guess now!” sometimes reciting a line or two,
calling the one professor there, “Herr Doktor, Herr
Lucifer,” or when she wanted to leave a boring
conversation, “I guess you could say I’ve a call.”
Everyone just thought I was dressing up, since
I didn’t even own a tie back then. As time
ran toward midnight, her head-in-the-oven-guess-now-bit
got funnier and funnier, and she got so into character
she’d shout, “Where’s Frieda? Nick?” and knock everyone out.
Years later, in London, I saw Frieda on the BBC
dedicating a blue plaque on her parents’ old house
near Primrose Hill. I first thought how
British the name—Primrose—sounded, how it could
have been the surname Plath’s fictional double
(Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar) would go by
in a second autobiographical novel, one about aging,
becoming a Fulbrighter, a wife, a mother, and then the end,
the unfaithful husband with a proper sounding British
name, an exotic other woman from the continent. Then I thought
about my friend’s Halloween joke, how Frieda
would double over in pain at it, and how I didn’t
even know where that friend lived now, how I couldn’t
call from London to say how ill I felt thinking about our youth,
about standing in the party’s corner when
I wanted to leave and she wanted to stay, and made
a bad, mean joke about how I wanted someone darker,
more German, more Jewish, more a mystery than her,
because of course we were about to start dating, a dating
that would last a week, if even, but seems painful
enough now it could have been a lifetime. Mostly,
though, I thought about when everyone was trashed
at that party, and she did the oven gag one last time,
no one in the kitchen remembering someone made
bean dip or melted queso so when she put her head on the rack,
she screamed in way I’d never heard before or since,
banged her head on the top of the oven trying to get out
before the soberest person there began pouring cold
water over the gridlines burnt into her face. The burns
were slight and healed in weeks. But the last time I saw her,
just beneath her eye, there was a tiny cross-shaped scar.
"The Birthplace" first published in Fastened to a Dying Animal (Pudding House Publications).
Bio
Gary Leising is an associate professor of English, teaching creative writing and poetry courses at Utica College. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati and an M.F.A. from the University of South Carolina. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barn Owl Review, Blackbird, Connecticut Review, The Cincinnati Review, River Styx, Margie: The American Journal of Poetry, Quarterly West, Sewanee Theological Review, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere, and he has published reviews and essays in The James Dickey Newsletter, Black Warrior Review and online at CLCWeb. Also, he was chosen by Russell Edson for the 2008 1/2K Prize from Indiana Review.