– I am recommended not even to read poetry, much less to write it. I wish I had even a little hope.
– Send me just the words “good night”, to put under my pillow,
Keats to Fanny Brawne
– I do not care a straw for foreign flowers. The simple flowers of our spring are what I want to see again.
Keats to James Rice
I
The last month in your little Roman house
your eyes grew huge and bright as those
a gentle animal opens to the night.
Although you could not write or read
you were calmed by the thought of books
beside your bed.
(Jeremy Taylor your favorite one.
Plato and the comic Don.)
“How long is this posthumous life of mine
to last,” you said.
What is a poet without breath enough?
The doctor made you swallow cupfuls of your blood
when it came up
out of your rotten lungs again.
Your study of medicine
made you suffer more the movements
of your death. One tiny fish
and a piece of black bread
to control the blood
every day you died. You starved for food
and air. For poetry. For love.
(Yet you could not read her
letters for the pain.)
One night you saw a candle flame
beautifully pass across a thread from one
taper to start another.
All month you heard the sound of water
weeping in the Bernini fount.
You asked your friend to lift you up,
and died so quietly he thought you slept.
They buried you with Shelley
at a cold February dawning
beside his drowned heart
which had survived a life
and death of burning.
II
Ruth and I visited your grave
in Rome’s furious August rain.
The little old Protestant plot
beyond the pyramid the Romans, home from Egypt, made
in the middle of the city.
All the names are English,
which nobody knows or nods to
in the awful noise and light. Nobody speaks.
This rain springs from ancient seas
that burst
behind the bones of my face
and wash in salt tides
over the small shells of my eyes.
Since my birth
I’ve waited for the terror of this place.
The gravekeeper in his hooded black
rubber cloak
wades ahead of us toward your tomb.
The streams that shape and change
along the tender’s rubber back
light in the thunder flash
into grotesque slits of eyes.
They see my fright. Ruth’s hand
is cold in my cold hand.
You, Keats, and Shelley and Ruth
and I all drown again
away from home
in this absurd rain of Rome,
as you once drowned in your own phlegm.
and I in my poem. I am afraid.
The grave keeper waits.
He raises his black arm.
He gestures in the black rain. The sky
moans long.
His hooded eyes fire again!
Suddenly I can read the stone
which publishes your final line:
Its date is the birthday of my brother!
“Here lies one whose name was writ on water.”
Oh Keats, the violet. The violet. The violet
was your favorite flower.
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