In an unexpected development of Romeo and Juliet’s story,
after they both decided not to be (as Hamlet would put it)
and were interred long enough to have decomposed,
their bones climbed out of the crypt where they were together,
buried in an embrace by their penitent families,
and started crawling back toward their respective ancestors’
burial grounds, to spend eternity there.
This was Shakespeare’s addition to Arthur Brooke’s
original poem, which ended the way we know.
But budgetary constraints forced him to scrap the scene,
unable to dramatize their skeletal crawl,
the difficulty of obtaining phosphorus for the special effects
being what it was. It was, after all, only the 1590s.
But now, thanks to the efforts
of the Massachusetts Bay Transport Authority,
a draft of the final scene has been unearthed
from a tunnel at the edge of Logan Airport
near the crash site of a pre-war British airplane
between Neptune Court and the two parallel Service Roads.
Since then lovers in Boston have been leaving each other
at a much higher rate than ever before,
moving back near their parents in their native states.
—
I say these things to you, standing on a platform.
You’ve cried a little bit in the subway car.
You will cry much more on the one-way train to your birthplace.
I cry in the bathtub later, staring into your eyes
on a laptop screen, dangerously close to the water
but too far away in a city you now once again call home.
When the sun sets, the ghosts show up in my bathroom.
They try to start their old “seize the day” routine—
looks like their bony brains rarely have any other thoughts.
But soon they hear their own words eat into each other,
there being no day to seize—only distance and roots.
Irrelevant as king bees, they mutter along
nervously, until I no longer hear them.
“To hell with the motherfuckers,” I tell myself.
I climb out of the bath. I wear your old robe. It fits me.
I wait a good while to call you, to give you the chance to miss me.
It’s time to put some old photographs on the wall:
when your face is in black and white, I think of it differently.
This is the beginning of our first and last winter apart.
