Eternal
Keats and Severn by the Lateran backdoor,
come to Rome in several senses
poor. The basket with its own little stove
and its wretched stew the poet chucks
onto the stones next to the sinking marble boat.
He’s done with rhyme, he feels it
from the first. There’s shit
everywhere—in vicoli, in fountains—humans shit
wherever they please
in the Eternally Shitty City. Like ancient
politicians showing battle scars, beggars display
deformities, blackened Byronic soles, running sores.
Coughing Keats, at the Casino Borghese, says
Napoleon’s sister is in “beautiful bad taste.” He looks
and looks at her heavy feet, the lovely dent
they make in the sensuous stone. In the flesh
the old girl’s full of leers these days
for the Royal Engineers. His bile,
his crawling skin when he sees her--
his own flesh withering on the bone . . . and
all those ousted princes dissipating along the Corso,
crumbling like columns all over the Italy that’s not
Italy yet, sad-eyed, impotent royals,
glittering, drunk . . .
Torlonia leans over the poet’s papers,
makes an offer and another that Severn knows
won’t wash. He gathers his friend’s drafts,
bows what is not a bow exactly and goes,
Torlonia gazing after like a man who sees
something he won’t speak of, won’t want
to remember. Too poetic, Keats says to Severn. What?
The naked Paulina, the poet whispers, too
young, too beautiful. Canova’s left out the rot, the
sweetness on the verge of nausea.
Severn bathes his brow,
tries to remember what to jot down, what
to embalm. Rich, but not lush, Keats murmurs,
turning his face to the wall.
Madame Mere insists
on seeing visions—that boy, Keats was it?
An eagle now, lifting a statue of her son into the sky
from whence would come French domination,
gleaming towers, cities reassembling
stone upon stone, the whole world happy
and subdued. Why would a dead poet
carry her dreadful son out of exile? The ways
of the world are strange, she says,
wrinkles radiating like joy
around her desperate eyes.
Apocalypse
The surgeon, before he uncovered
the boy on the table, said Well, what
have you done to yourself? lifted the towel
the mother had placed so carefully, and actually
shouted Good God! (The kid’s color was fine,
his shoulders and neck thick with muscle,
but there was his huge ass gouged and shredded—
exploded he told his wife--all three glutes,
and deep in the debris, exposed, the gleaming
nerve kinked, twisted.) By now, the father
frowned at his side, the one who’d turned
nineteen on Guadalcanal, the one who said
it was the worst wound he’d ever witnessed
on a living human. Even the nurses in the ER
had seen the boy signing a big-time football
contract on the local news, a hometown angel.
And, it was gone, the trip north, the college degree.
He didn’t know this would set him free,
a stowaway through the Panama Canal,
that he’d sip hours of sacramental psychosis
from a tisane mixed by a child in Nishisonogi,
that he’d climb slowly to the Parthenon clothed in light,
limp down Fishamble Street, Handel's Messiah
surging through his head. The surgeon,
one of a set of rather famous twin docs,
would be dead three years later, victim
of a random infection. The boy’s family gave up
the Methodist Church, its Hymns for Times
of Trouble and Persecution. And here was
the wonder of it on that sunlit afternoon:
There was no pain and only a little blood
as he stood in the yard across from his own
front door, the carsnose to nose in the street
going white, everything white as lambswool
for just a moment . . . Even then he didn’t go down,
stood wondering why they were looking at him
like that, why his excitable mother was so
calm, barely touching his arm, then someone
holding him up as she drove the family Chevy
onto the neighbor’s inviolable grass
and someone opened the car’s back door
and someone else whispered Can you take
one step? And, you know, he could.
Erice
tucked up in the western sky—
Eryx tranquilized,
spayed, forgotten, cold clouds
moving through her
empty streets like ghosts—no,
ghosts of ghosts
Image: Rome, Via della Conciliazione. Photo by Ron Smith