Outlaw Style: Poems

Edwin Booth at the Players’ Club: Portrait by John Singer Sargent, 1890

Edwin Booth at the Players’ Club: Portrait by John Singer Sargent, 1890 See the players well bestowed. —HAMLET I have no brother, I am no brother . . . I am myself alone. —RICHARD III “Owling” again, as Edwin called it, we talked of the late-night weather— new snow soft on Gramercy Park— as I sketched, conjuring the clock back to show him at his zenith. The jets hissed to dictate my light. Image fixed, I primed, then worked nearly in pure pigment with only the necessary oil: his velvet jacket’s aubergine, high collar and cravat. The gaze that transfixed half a century and projected such mystery from a sparrow of a man made radiant by his voice. He posed before the dark hearth. I gave the room an amber haze, as if he were himself the fire’s source. It was his reckless brother, of course, the name he would not utter, as much as Denmark’s royal curse, murder in his history, dreams the color 64 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 64 of blood.“I am not by nature nocturnal, but tragedy has made me famous, and I cannot stroll the city unmolested.” And yet, he still basked in the glory of his Hundred Nights of Hamlet, as if Disaster were both kin and country. He too had faced a crazed assassin and wore the spent shot on his watchchain. I have rendered him on the threshold of a rhetoric that might explode— a cocked pistol, black powder his element. My intent? The Prince of Players, with Furies hovering in the wings. Calcium flares for isolation. Shadows hinting at Hals and the pallor of a martyr from Valesquez. Both genius and witness. His poise was always on the verge of collapse. Tact and damage augmented the strain. “The readiness is all,” he said.“Paint that.” Between the talons of truth and rumor, he rehearsed Hamlet’s paltry resolve, a man, alas, on the brink of rancor. He would play it to the grave. 65 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 65 ...