When we rummage through
the wardrobes of the dead,
are we not combining
reunion, disguise, and hiding place?
All these are the specialties of dreams.
Into--no, out of my mother's closet
I awoke from a dream of Hamlet.
I was cast as Hamlet, hero, prince--
no contradiction that I was a woman
and still alive. Had the tragedy
turned inside out into a comedy?
I'd gone away toward the end
and was trying to return in secret
as Hamlet does from shipboard in Act IV.
There had to be, then, one more act to come.
Nevertheless I'd managed to get home,
but whether in order to ransack her closet
for a disguise or lie low there awhile
or simply visit--all these motivations
were packed into a single narrow space.
The Queen dies at the end, which wasn't yet.
My mother's dead, although not in the dream.
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Queen in the dreamplay. Loved me.
Anxious about me in the dangerous court,
anxious about my departure,
anxious about my clandestine return,
as mothers are, and helpless, too, to help me,
as mothers are. I woke up struggling,
my right, my writing hand, my whole right arm
clenched and bent painfully under the pillow.
Had I been taking ghost dictation?
Or into what improbable disguises
had I been attempting to insert
my alarmingly clumsy and recalcitrant body?
Cumbersome petticoats, tight pointed shoes,
layer upon layer of dresses. In the closet
were crammed not a queen's robes but an old lady's--
lumpy white cardigan, green-flowered dress--
hanging there empty, like my mother's clothes
when I and my sister opened her closet door
and hurriedly chose things for her to wear.
Helping her get dressed felt strange, belated.
Her closetful would soon, as we both knew,
be given away and kept at the same time,
relegated to the realm of dream.
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Going through what one's mother no longer needs
to see what fits and simply to take stock
is what women growing older do.
And not just women, and not clothes alone.
"Into my grave I'll wear that Yes of theirs,"
wrote J. of his acquired Greek nod (our headshake).
Did my mother wear Yes to the grave?
Does Hamlet? How she loved the play. Will I?
The dream, not having reached Act V, won't say,
although the dream-script also writes the waking day.
Nights I go to my temporary grave
bathed in the retrospective tide of books
and in the prospective tide of dreams--
the tide of books goes out, the tide of dreams comes in--
grateful for having seen and read and seen
Hamlet over and over
even in the black box of my skull.
Courage! The lights go down
and each night's theater
flowers into color, motion, sound,
the clenched fist of the dreamer
vainly struggling to take it down.
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The closet full of costumes
opened, but only to the sleeper's eye,
just as the dreamplay opened out and out
by folding inward, taking up no space.
Both play and closet
were bigger on the inside than the outside.
The closet was in the play
but the play was in the closet.
Think of Lucy fumbling among fur coats
in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
who finds herself abruptly not in a musty wardrobe
in an abandoned room in the countryside in wartime
but in a frozen forest at night in a magic country.
Yet between the trees she can still just make out
the wardrobe's open door and through it daylight.
It was as I was fingering my mother's
unqueenly sweaters, shirtwaists, jerseys, pants
that the stage lights failed and I found myself
confronting daylight, my disguise half on,
home for a little, poised to leave again.
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