Horatio

Chenrui Zhang

I.

Tell me how to hold a man who’s already

leaving the room before he’s left it.

Tell me what shape to contort myself into,

gargoyle, doorframe, second-best chair,

so that wherever he turns there’s a me-shaped

space to fall into, requiring little more than

gravity, little less than choice.

It isn’t weakness if it’s a choice, supposedly,

and I suppose I have made of my whole body

a doorway he can walk through without knocking.

I have made of my whole life a long corridor

leading only to him, lit only when he is lit,

dark when he goes dark, and when he goes dark

I do not panic, I become the dark with him.

You want to know what love is, but knowing

is no saviour. Love is the body that doesn’t flinch

when ghosts parade through. Staying when staying

makes no sense, when a prince is talking to the dead,

only half-alive himself. Love is holding your tongue,

holding the lantern, holding the whole cold night

together with your hands because his hands are busy

holding his mind together, and somebody has to

hold something.

Love is the somebody.

II.

He won’t look at me the way he looks at a court,

all calculations, all eyes-on-the-exits. Nor the way

he looks at his father’s ghost—that’s a look full

of static, full of static and grief.

Like this will he look at me: like a man checking

a door is still a door. Still opens, still leads

somewhere that isn’t the inside of his own skull.

He looks at me in prayer, never in truth.

He does not believe it will be answered, but mouths

the words to keep his hands from shaking: the only

sentence in Denmark he need not read twice

to believe.

III.

Snow at Elsinore, or no snow—only the white

of him not sleeping, the white of a page he cannot

fill, the white of his own face when he looks in glass

and finds someone else’s son looking back.

I hold my love in my teeth.

He thinks I’m shivering from the cold.

I keep pressing him like a bruise, just to check

it still hurts, to make sure I am still here,

a thing of nerves and blood, and more than

devotion dressed in man’s clothes.

Some nights the moon comes in low and blue

and lays itself along the floor like a verdict.

Some nights I think: this is the sublime.

Two men in a cold room, not even touching,

both on fire.

IV.

We never touch when it matters.

We touch in the after: after the play, the poison,

after the ghost has said its piece and gone back to

whatever waiting room the dead keep.

In the actual moment, our hands just hang there

at our sides like awkward apologies we don’t know

how to begin. Like two animals that clearly

want the same patch of grass, of sunlight,

and are too proud, or too frightened,

definitely too Danish, to say so.

I have spent more of my life almost-

reaching for him than I have doing anything else:

the hand half-raised, the breath half-taken,

the sentence that starts I and ends nowhere

because somewhere in the middle of it his eyes

cease me.

V.

Good night,

I keep saying

to no one, to the dark,

to the frame of him still leaning

in the doorway of my mind, still asking,

asking me as he always had, to stay a little

longer, to bear witness a little longer, to love

him a little longer than was reasonable, than

was safe, than any one heart should be asked to.

CHENRUI ZHANG is a top 15 winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2021, and was commended in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2020. Chenrui is happy, and can be found on Substack @chenruiz.