Poem 344

An intriguing aspect of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is that it ends with Malcolm as king but the witches have foreseen that the murdered-in-a-ditch Banquo’s son Fleance will be crowned and establish a dynasty lasting generations … mindful of this sometimes a production of the play will show Fleance skulking at the back of the ‘happy ever after’ last scene …

… I’m also thinking here about how Malcolm seems to represent a new age of rationality, turning the corner from the ‘blood-boltered’ dark ages Scotland of brawling warlords such as Banquo and Macbeth – but in fact if Fleance gains power it’s probably going to mark a return to a further era of internecine violence … I imagine this son of Banquo as understanding the primitivism of the culture and populace better than the ahead-of-his-time Malcolm who Fleance sees as cold blooded like a frog, that this historical moment is a flash of light before the clouds once more descend …

… in this poem Fleance sees himself as a sheepdog working the flock to his own ends, whetting his ambition and eying the incumbent king just as Macbeth did in the generation before him, the cycle repeating itself …

( I like the image of teeth as battlements, the double meaning of ruff (sheep and courtiers), the dog who will learn to whistle summing up Fleance’s awareness of himself as posing as the king’s fixer and muscle until he can seize his opportunity … the lines in parentheses are me imagining the other side of the vision the witches show Macbeth of Fleance and his descendants wearing the crown, ie. that Fleance had a ‘turn’, was somehow psychically linked in that moment and felt his destiny set … the cutty grass (along with the flock and sheepdog) is intended to give the story a New Zealand inflection, perhaps it relates back to Poem 141 and Poem 319 … )

Fleance

My father said
                             run
           the frog squats in his mouth now
           with teeth for battlements

           but I
excelled
                 keep my footing
on the backs of the flock
and worry a ruff here
or there
                 a sharp and secret king
I am the dog who will learn
to whistle

                      cover me father
                      I am not what you wanted
                      but the frog who stuffs
                      your tongue with mud
                      is malcolm
                      (the dirty afternoon long
                      I sat and quivered
                         'gone out'
                      while your killer saw me crowned
                      in a mound of cutty grass)

your last advice
was the best
            fly
                 the flock bears me up
                 as long as I move across it
                 a tooth or a whisper
                 for each sharp ear
                                                     this peaceable king
                  is lean
                  and green yet
                                               and meticulous
                  in a country that does not understand
                  his physic
                                       by the hoop of his frog jaw
                  I will take him

and leave you
father
to gulp ditchwater
in peace