The Marlowe Papers Read Online Free

‘Robert, will you join us?’
    Ned doesn’t catch the slurs, his beery speech
too full of them to find a fault elsewhere.
I motion at the chair. Greene hesitates.
‘You don’t prefer to celebrate alone?
I wouldn’t want to steal your evening.’
                                                                             ‘I’d
    be happy to hear how you live by the pen.
There must be quite an art to it,’ I say.
Greene eyes me carefully. ‘I don’t give tips
to the competition. Nose out. But I’ll stay.
So long as there’s wine and Ned is paying for it.
The good stuff. French. None of that sherry stuff.’
He pulls a chair in. Ned is scandalised.
‘Seems one too many free dinners has spoiled your palate!’
‘Too many? Who can have too many?’ Greene
twiddles his beard to dislodge evidence.
     
    An hour he drank with us before a whore
was his excuse to leave us. All that hour
he talked about his books and of the plays
he promised to Ned. Occasionally he smiled,
but only sidewise, flinching every time
a groundling came to give Alleyn a slap
for his performance. ‘How to follow that?
Great Tamburlaine has clearly conquered all.’
He eyed me shrewdly. ‘After such a play,
the next must surely disappoint us, no?’
     
    ‘More of the same!’ cries Ned, still full in sail.
‘Tell us what happens next. How does he die?
Who overthrows him?’
     
                                       None but God himself,
    as I have learnt, but didn’t answer then.
I let the bluffers fill the empty space.
Ned offered up a plot. I had my own:
to guard my tongue, but give rein to my pen.

THE LOW COUNTRIES
    A room above an inn. The foreign words
on floors beneath me, drifting up like smoke
from kitchen servants, say I’m the stranger here.
The fields are almost marsh. Two days of rain
and still the skies are pouring. Clothing, soaked,
sweating before the open fire. My skin
is wrinkled as the elderly, my feet
as white and sodden as the Dover cliffs
stood out in water. All my papers soaked,
the ink cried out of them: a blot, a streak,
then blank again. Last night, I dreamt of rape.
     
    From the space under my cot, from all the quiet
beneath my sleeping body, came the shift
of someone who had waited for my breath
to slow and mark that I was vulnerable.
A shadow consolidated into flesh,
some man who needed, more than meat or drink,
my soul’s destruction. Not a face, no voice,
but the cold desire for what he couldn’t have
I recognised. Intrusion was his name.
And the cry of fear he stuffed back in my throat
with fists of bedclothes echoed in the room:
     
    a room with no one in it. Yet, afraid,
I kept my eyes on the door until the first
dull light began to detail me, alone.
I drifted back to sleep just after dawn,
exhausted by my vigilance and fear,
and found myself at the nightmare’s end, distressed
and running room to room in some great palace,
with no one recognising me as friend,
and, bursting finally into a hall,
my nightshirt torn, my privacy exposed,
I found myself half dressed before a court
of witnesses. The room was thick with them,
the walled-up souls who manage history.
‘Hold her down fast,’ they said. ‘Cut out her tongue.’
     
    The rain falls still. It’s two hours after noon.
The silent shame that followed from my dream
is reeking from the dampness of the clothes
I took a walk in, trying to be clean,
though all the dirt is on the inside now.
And bursting to be told, to be let out,
but, with the stain of it, who can I tell
who wouldn’t blame me for inflaming it?
     
    I take my driest paper, mix the ink,
and open where the daughter stumbles in
with bleeding stumps for hands, a bloody chin,
and blood ballooning as she tries to speak;
each word a victim of her absent tongue
translated to an empty sphere of air;
anguished to tell some caring heart who wreaked
this violent silence over their guilty deed.
But