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.