The next poem arises from the intersection
of the present and the past.
And the title alludes to a letter by Keats
where he says a poet is the most unpoetical of anything
in existence because he is continually
filling some other body.
I like this and was strucked by it
because it's what's happening a lot in the new manuscript.
And I was also always trying to write a Keats poem
and always failing.
So I decided not to.
And then that's how I finally did it,
by filling the other body, I suppose.
It's called, "A Day Passes Through the Medium of Identity."
"The pine, like the wet proof, rising from twilight
does not give away what century this is.
Dusk cools to a plum of nitrogen.
The birds spread their empire of melancholic wit.
In this, I could be St. Augustine, Aurelius,
or my own lost grandmother as a girl humming by the window.
At a universal point, the birds' ecstatic industry shuts down.
I have been wondering about this for days,
wondering if we are in the same life
or if I should curse the house bringing me such truths.
The truth is I once wrote an elegy for Keats,
having stood in the window of his house,
a museum on the Piazza Espagna.
There was a lock of his hair you were not allowed to touch--
the color of balsa or summer grass.
The death mask lay on the table by his bed.
The window overlooked a cloud of potted hydrangeas on the steps.
But if you did not look down, straight
out there was only a pure level of blue and absolute box
of sky, the kind of view ascribed to the dead.
I told my friend I did not feel his spirit.
And in the very room where he could
have been the lamia or even a Roman street thief
when he lay in his sick bed and watched
the chalky hour before morning.
The fever was erotic.
The nightingale did not love him.
Its short elliptical breaths were the effort
to raise his root once, imagining fat Madonnas blowing
on their breakfast fires and air glassing at the fringe--
a sweat off the spirit which could be Rafaello, or Autumn,
or Christ, the seed of a man hotter and briefer than the dark
bitch of poetry."