T.

Citizen K. leaves for NYC/Boston tomorrow,
and plans to take in a Brooklyn Academy of Music
production of Macbeth, with Patrick Stewart in the leading role.
The following is from a NYTimes article:

Mr. Stewart described an experience he had recently, as he walked alone before dusk near his rural village in Oxfordshire. “Suddenly I had this urge to speak the role, and there’s nobody about,” he said. “So I started at the top of the play, with ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen,’ and I said the whole role through aloud, just to refresh my memory. It was a long walk.

“But it hit me before I said the lines ‘Light thickens, and the crow/Makes wing to the rooky wood’ — That’s exactly how it was,” he continued. “And I thought: This is wonderful. Every night in New York when I come to that part, I’ll remember where I was, on this lonely road with bare fields on either side, and there’s a mist hanging over the field, and indeed there are crows.”

Ah....to have been one of those Oxfordshire crows....

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After school as a child, I'd toast-up four slices
of white bread, slather them with margarine
and raspberry jam, wrap them in foil, then head out
to my beloved woods behind the house. My favorite
perch was in a maple tree we named "The Horse Tree"
for it's zigzag curve in the trunk. I'd sit on this
swayback equine substitute, leaning into the bark,
and eat my snack, then sing as if the waning afternoon
were my last on earth -- usually hymns or spirituals,
blasting my ten-year-old soprano notes across rooftops
and treetops, oblivious of any other universe
than my own. Were there crows? Probably, and Stellar's jays
and robins and chicadees, an owl or two. All silent
during my backwoods chant, which vanished once adolescence
slid itself in unasked, unexpected.

Not quite Patrick Stewart, I acknowledge,
and Renton is far from Oxfordshire. And the only
Shakespeare I knew of, then, belonged to my oldest sister --
slim blue volumes I coveted like a crow covets
a lost trinket sparkling on the path to home.