JANE MCKINLEY
SOLILOQUY
For Curtis W. Lasell (1953-2005)
Three weeks he’s lain with Shakespeare
propped against the knee that’s bent
on folding up, remembering the womb.
He’s learning to recite To be, or not
to be as if his life depends on whether
he delivers it without a pause, as if
a single hesitation might deliver him
to undiscover'd country, cut him down
mid-sentence, cutting short the tragedy
that is his own: elixir that is killing him,
a mother who would rather have him dead
than bear the shame of tainted illness.
He’s arming himself with words against
oblivion, against ammonia rising in his brain,
against weakness that prevents his doing
anything but think. Last time was different:
hurtled breakneck through night
to an abandoned station halfway there,
a place where time does not exist for those
arriving, those who linger on the platform,
unaware of what they’re waiting for.
On his return, he learned a week had passed,
but to his mind he’d only spent the night.
He can’t remember what he saw or heard
that haunts him, what it is that prompts: To be...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist and artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble, a professional chamber music group based in Princeton, New Jersey. Her life as a poet began in 2003 when, haunted by an image, she began writing after a lapse of thirty years. Her manuscript Vanitas won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize and was published by Texas Tech University Press in 2011. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Five Points, Southern Poetry Review, on Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She earned a Bachelor of Music from Northwestern University, an MFA in historical musicology from Princeton University, and studied Baroque oboe in Vienna with the late Jürg Schaeftlein. She lives in Hopewell, New Jersey with her husband.