Nothing Like the Sun

The Dark Lady - 1

Let me tell you a secret:

Death is only punctuation — a comma; a colon; a semi-colon; a dash ... take your pick. It is only a moment, one in which we pause, neither breathing in nor breathing out.

There. Now that you know, there is no need to fear this voice in your head. You can hear me ... can't you? Words so clear that I could be right there, standing next to you, the breath from my lips warming your ear. But reach for me, and there is no one, no thing but this thing called "story."

But even here, in the punctuated places of peace that are beyond the living, it is a struggle to turn the neck, to twist chin to shoulder to look back for one who plunged the knife deep in the bloodless places of deepest pain. And yet I'm here. Death may lurk about in dark corners with His usual parlour tricks: hood drawn low, dry bones rattling, doors and windows banging shut on windless days; but that scythe (mere wood and steel) is no match for the densely woven fabric of spirits that were joined before they were robed in flesh, and will still be connected long after the flesh is gone once more. Doesn't matter what you call the ones for whom 'love' is more than a passing itch, or a means to some material but ultimately meaningless end — 'soul mate', 'kindred spirit', 'other half.' Whatever the label, the Romeo who accidentally precedes his Juliet knows no other path: he hovers at the threshold, waiting for the world to do its turning and bring to him she with whom he belongs; and he holds out his hands, palms up, in welcome, even with the poison still bitter upon his lips.

So here I am. Ari called. I have come.

But his departure will be a slow leaving; and there will be plenty of rain. Not a summer rain — the ones that used to come after a heat that has been simmering on the stove all day: a hard, sizzling pan of blue sky, the sun a melting circle of butter, and hovering between them a stew of air almost too thick to breathe. And then the heavens would belch and from some deep and faraway place would come a rumble; lightning would try to blink the tears from its eyes, fluttering like a candle at an open window, mocking the moon. And suddenly — the rain: a kind of hot and hard and joyous weeping that bent every stem and trunk into obeisance as it swept aside the heat and slaked the thirst of all who had managed to endure the day.

But this rain where Ari is dying, it's an ugly rain: sharp winter needles that plummet down from dense pin-cushions of charcoal sky and prick the skin, soughing chill deep within the bones. So come close, if you are going to wait here with me — huddle next to me, stay warm. And don't be surprised if any of what you hear sounds familiar. This is a story the world has already heard, in bits and pieces, a thousand times before:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day ...

... Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds ...

... My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun ...

Yes, it was Will who first put words to it ... in his fashion. But those poems: they, too, are moments, impressions, musings, petit morts; feelings that blaze in the hearth or beat the shutter against the wall at night, and then are only silence and ashes and puddles in the morning. And Will, he did what he always did: plenty of hissing and slithering, but no fangs.

Writing is a dangerous pursuit. The man not careful with his quill in Elizabeth's England could find himself the unlucky recipient of ample time for personal reflection in Clink Prison; or, like Kit Marlowe, with a knife where once a clever eye that missed nothing once shone. An argument about money, so it was said; but Marlowe's pen fell silent.

So Will was careful. Those Sonnets, they lift the hem, they show a glimpse of ankle: a 'lovely boy;' a frustrated poet; and me (go ahead and call me The Dark Lady if you like ... I'll try not to roll my eyes). We're there, the three of us, in those poems — dramatis personae, but with no name, players with virtually no lines, scenes mixed up, topsy turvy, front to back, so you don't know who is coming and who is going or when they came or went.

Those poems —they are not a story. If they were, you'd know that the Lovely Boy was one born doubly blessed, it is true; a young man who took for granted what the rest of us could only imagine. But beneath the glitter of gold that surrounded him was the unlovely dross of struggling endlessly to grasp one thing that was always just beyond his reach.

Around the same time I was hauled off a British privateer's ship wearing nothing but a blood-stained shirt — I was thrown into a wagon alongside some other goods bound for the back door of the Lord High Treasurer's home on The Strand — a poet was leaving his wife and children in Stratford and walking in good leather boots from his father's tannery up the Edgeware Road into London to take a job at a theatre — in the stables. That is where I first saw him, years later: standing outside, clutching a bridle in exchange for a coin. When you have mouths to feed back home, words are a luxury; they're a living only if Fortune smiles upon you.

Little wonder, then, that Will made a fortune, first, handily crafted an identity for the nation while he was at it, while also hiding a lust for the pure blue flame of art the best he could. And all of this, like an alchemist, he made from mere paper, ink and plagiarism.

As for me, well ... Suffice it to say that, even if you have read Sonnets, the story of the Dark Lady, the Lovely Boy, and the Poet is one that you only think you know.

This is what really happened: