Airtight

The trees, phased piles and watered chafes,

Storey up foliage falling for the bud.

The dogs, fast wide-eyed, dozens of shapes

Traverse the green course, day of grass and mud.

Airtight in our skins, the obvious plan

To visit the parklands to talk in the sun

Turns to rain sprinkle chases, to understand

Limits of our reach. What’s done and undone.

The utmost of the sky cloud blue spiral

Is uppermost to our recall and sight,

Upright and walking, making words a pivot.

No business but ours, learning the planet.

Airtight waterproofed down-to-earth types

We live on atmosphere. No fear, at all.

Moon

When Brian Eno and Roger Eno and Daniel Lanois

Musicians on a quest for touch

Trialled the sounds that became Apollo,

Chambers had landed on that thumped surface

And moonwalking was done if you were suitable.

“Two hard things: to bring the moonlight into a chamber.”

Their sounds are a drift over close-up craters,

Romance and realism exchanging experiences,

Bottoming where the sun don’t shine.

It is but a dream yet for most of us,

Moon the size of our thumbnail.

On our acoustic planet music’s a consolation:

We fill our spaces with its rare breathers

From the stone hard facts that would grind us down.

Gender

“I go frequent flyer just to relax,”

Says the woman Theseus, “with your tax.”

Says the manly Queen of the Amazons

“Now I’m with him. I hang with paragons.”

Swoons that actor the lady Demetrius

“That voice in the air is the sweetliest

That pertains to the man dressed Hermia,

Or maybe it’s Helena, as things transpire.”

Puck, the Indian Girl, quick and ageless,

Tricks the best, worst, and all into Dumpt Humph

Be he lion or ass, lioness or less, a fright!

Writes the critic Cobweb of the first night:
“Lines delivered with verve. Casting a triumph.

The playwright speaks for all. Music, gorgeous.”

Bard

As the world turns slowly again viridian

His realm divides between English and Latin.

Decide which deicide keeps the medium,

Stave off lunacy depicting the patterns.

Country is fresh this day yet town is thronged

With his voice varieties, heard undercover.

Comedy like tragedy is by everyone tongued.

Soul transforms in company of a lover.

Sphery, thrumming, waxen, plain-song, cuckoo,

His words catch and flame on the burning deck.

“It is not enough to speak, but to speak true,”

His creed, his everyday reality check.

He is catholic to a fault, perhaps.

He is fissile and a pratfall chap.

Gazetteer

 The owned shared names that bind us and settle

Make London Athens for an hour or three.

Each field, forest, stream, street, home memory

Whether tempest landscape, or hand with a petal.

Names half-remembered moonee in the ponds,

Queenscliffe by riptide and corangamite

Inhabit us who inhabit their well worn sites

Through the breathing space that is our bond.

Let’s break from the caught world a day or three

To rehearse lines in secret, a brand new play

By the esteemed if shaky changer of names!

Let’s fool with the form of things and play games

With how love has worked since veriest day

When happily ownsomes birthed stagg’ringly free!

 

The brilliant speech at the opening of Act V includes the famous lines: "And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name", and not just the pen but more especially the memory that wishes to remember. Naming is one underlying interest of the play. Queenscliffe, verb, to name a cliff after a queen. Corangamite, noun, salty water. The sonnet is inspired by the idea of the players escaping town to practise their play in the forest, where they can concentrate in a dedicated space, but also where no one can steal their ideas. Doubtless Shakespeare's troupes would do this, though exactly why anyone would want to steal the ideas for 'Pyramus and Thisbe' is left fairly much up in the air.