A Copy of Ophelia Hangs in Miss Havisham’s Living Room 

I watched a spider dance.

It knew the right movements.

It had no tie to civility.

There was also a woman in tattered white

dancing down a staircase.

The spider and the woman 

confused their opportunities,

ignoring the setting

though neither knew the other existed.

I need my own approval

to make choices.

It is the charm 

of knowing myself.

I distinguish contours from a sense of space.

I am between light and shadow. 

Not dancing.

Dancing is not a skill,

it is a set of directions

purposeful only to an end.

Then the disorder of imagination

repels what went before.

I am a man that dreams gather about.

I am a book that skips moments,

chapters and illustrations.

What interests me is the bibliography.

To dance, you need approval.

To be, no approval is necessary.

And I am to be.

You can’t dance on water,

and it needs no approval.

It smashes into cliffs or devours ships.

I would like to be a waterfall.

Crushing what comes my way

and what tries to escape 

I catch and toss.

I toss away.

I am never where I am

or where you think you will find me.

The obvious is not always observed.

There are no staircases, underfalls,

only water, falling.

With dignity, 

not like one drowning

pleading for help.

Water just is. 

It never screams. 

It terrorizes when it 

unexpectedly feels the need.

It can never be relied upon.

Stairs dismiss continuation.

They’re drawn from consequence.

They end before the future can be indicated.

The prediction fails 

while the last step is taken.

Taken to where?

The spider is an unheralded birth.

It better dance,

because optimism is a morsel dressed and blinded by its flight.

Processed with indifference,

fate is cast to conclusions. 

Depression’s discoveries 

fill a room when the music stops.

But had the music ever begun?

I see ellipses unwind

as the ashen walls 

fade into transparencies- skits attempted but never performed.

That white dress, sewn and torn,

a caricature of the wearer descending a worn hardwood staircase. 

Arriving before and after,

the cloaked effect and cause. 

There is no innocence in knot tying,

or taking a branding iron to an idea.

An idea that hurt, bled, and stung.

Water causes pain.

Spiders can bite.

A woman can get caught in traps. 

An ambush is a recluse conspiracy,

a blindfold over a threshold.

Cold and artificial, 

the room becomes a remembrance.

Troubled with decay and images 

tussled with promises expected but unfilled.

Deception in an unappealing room is a deed 

I can fence with even when compulsive.

Then again, this is not my room.

Loop around the cleat, 

and pull on the loose end of the rope.

Admire the copy of Ophelia,

ask the resemblance of guests to leave.

The walls absorb what is not possessed.

The spider never attended the rehearsal.

Neither did the greatest desire.

When there is no notice, great expectations solve no riddles.

Suspense is part of the fearlessness of hope.

Hope holding back tears as no one arrives, and all leave in the same breath.

Everything is accustomed to its surroundings

but accustomed to a fleeting presence.

That is bare, empty and without apologies.

What appears when the dull shimmering light shows dust settling

on the water where Ophelia lies still? 

Poor Ophelia,

mournless in a room with crumbled wedding cake in molding napkins. 

Ophelia, a copy of a ceremony always in progress, never in sight. 

A painter, inclined toward ambivalence,

could ask a writer with ethos 

to develop a mishap for a wall hanging.

Wickedness is an interval, time a chance to address it. 

The room had character,

not seen, 

but felt as the woman in white attempted to straighten the painting.

A painting that could never be aligned.

The water seeped into the cracks of sanity.

The insanity slid down the winding stairs.

Ophelia lingers.

There was a glimpse of a girl and a boy.

Was the girl part of the crime?

She was holding the boy’s hand.

Everybody would like to have lived their life differently.

To be a murderer, survived on a ship of dreaded darkness.

I am a head hidden behind a raised collar,

fiddling with a box of matches.

Morality is a wish inside a dream. 

Smell the allusion of stages.

Without evidence, secrets stiffen.

Then break into spindles of indifference 

that explore sincerity, doubt, and turmoil.

After interrogation,

guilt awakens the lies imagination feeds upon,

denying the visible stains, 

deeming them unseen.

There is a permission

to note nothing while dancing.

Fragments accumulate on the stairs,

scraps broken and slippery.

That spider notices there are bigger blacker spiders.

A copy of Ophelia hangs in the living room,

on a wall of dismal paint and fractured plaster.

She had seen those children.

Yes, she had. 

Ophelia hangs 

in a room full of lacquered staleness and an unplayed piano.

Unplayed for forty years. 

Ophelia in the same place,

exiting time.

Her icy pale blue, against her white skin. 

Something is unsettling about her 

and the woman in the white wedding dress, 

sallow with age, frayed with time’s claws

who cries for no one. 

Ophelia on a wall, 

fixed like the center of aftersight

and the other as if spirited by a meaningless mist 

coming down a staircase to meet callers.

There is no reality.

It has dissolved with the spider’s lives.

Only misfortune

unties what has elapsed and places it

where it can lie 

uncomfortably without the benefit of why.

It is justification for nothing,

and I am what sees through

all that is nothing’s something.

I am

eventuality,

a precipice where 

waiting is a slow continual movement 

on an unplayed piano. 

A painting dulled and obscured 

bears no resemblance to life occurring,

or recurring. 

Bonds

lay before the clarified.

And completeness is an abstract noun.

Abstract, like a coil disappearing among other coils in thoughts like coils.  

The mind, set aside,

develops extremes rather than wonders.

Confrontations with the present

have to have a past.

But whose?

And why care?

To trample what would have been pleasure?

Half-awakened pleasure or is that agony?

You can feel but not possess.

Laughter finds refuge in the grimy, neglected walls.

Secluded from beliefs,

unhinged by fascination,

events bow to propositions.

This is what reflection tells me 

when I enter this room of little demand,

to imagine what is below the beginning.

Spackles of madness smooth the walls.

But here I am,

in this room of final expressions.

Within that dilemma you foresaw,

reality or dream

or

a yarn tangled in threads

yet a good knot can be easily untied.

Use its reflection.

A destiny amid remnants,

stems of dried flowers, an outline of an arrangement

on the broken glass table below Ophelia, 

a book popular because it has no cause to be otherwise.

A sight to conjure imaginative propositions.

Staging, deliberate and without reward. 

A tragedy amongst long-winded myths.

Ask the quests?

Or the ghosts.

Those that have lost all passion.

Did the girl notice the boy hunting the spider?

Black spiders accumulate.

They are aware of what is missing and create webs. 

I noticed the painting,

but it felt like it wasn’t merely hanging anymore.  

Circles ambush certainty.

Repentance rescues another exit.

An exit always in continuance,

a path that stumbles down a long staircase into a living room 

with a painting that lost its symbolism long ago.

I am no longer

eventuality.

I have passed where my thoughts arrived.

I am fine with what is without.

The hard slap of Satis House. 

A jilted woman in white.

A young woman in white.

A copy of a copy?

Or just a copy?

The match is lit.

The flames engulf.

Yet the inside has no ashes.

None at all.  

Only a slight sheen of wetness from a waterfall.

Philip received his Master of Arts in Psychology from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He has published six poetry books, with another forthcoming. Three novels and two plays.He has a column in the magazine Per Niente. He enjoys all things artistic.