Two Poems By Dan Campion

                                 Shades of Pale

I listened to The White Album again,
the first time in a decade, waiting for
quotations from King Lear, which never came.
They’re on a different record. Memory shifts
things so. While Edgar and the Earl endure
the storm, the storm must move along and howl
its own way through the world, beyond recall.
The players are all dead or old, in thrall
to time, their circumstances, fair or foul,
a clinging pall for which there is no cure.
Regardless of a star performer’s gifts,
the offstage climaxes are much the same,
allowing for stray jolts, a blank-faced bore,
an old king slaying pale and distant men.

                                   Repertory

Between the limits of the large and small,
assuming there are limits, human-scale
events relieve our boredom, but they fail
to move along the plot, whose rise or fall,
assuming there’s a plot, has no fourth wall,
nor fifth, nor sixth. We lean against the rail
of some unnumbered balcony, the tale
unfolding toward a distant curtain call.
The denouement, as space itself expands,
gets shifted further out. It’s looking red
from here, a minor nick Laertes gives
to Hamlet. There, for now, the matter stands,
with Gertrude still athirst. Much may be said
yet. Brushing up offstage, Ophelia lives.

Dan Campion is the author of A Playbill for Sunset (2022) and Peter De Vries and Surrealism (1995) and co-editor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (1981, 2nd ed. 1998, 3rd ed. 2019). Dan’s poetry has appeared previously in Grand Little Things and in Able Muse, Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, Think, and many other magazines. A selection of his poems titled The Mirror Test is forthcoming from MadHat Press.