WEBVTT

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The next poem arises
from the intersection

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of the present and the past.

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And the title alludes
to a letter by Keats

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where he says a poet is the
most unpoetical of anything

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in existence because
he is continually

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filling some other body.

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I like this and
was strucked by it

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because it's what's happening
a lot in the new manuscript.

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And I was also always
trying to write a Keats poem

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and always failing.

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So I decided not to.

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And then that's how
I finally did it,

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by filling the other
body, I suppose.

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It's called, "A Day Passes
Through the Medium of Identity."

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"The pine, like the wet
proof, rising from twilight

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does not give away
what century this is.

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Dusk cools to a
plum of nitrogen.

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The birds spread their
empire of melancholic wit.

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In this, I could be St.
Augustine, Aurelius,

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or my own lost grandmother as
a girl humming by the window.

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At a universal point, the birds'
ecstatic industry shuts down.

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I have been wondering
about this for days,

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wondering if we are
in the same life

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or if I should curse the
house bringing me such truths.

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The truth is I once
wrote an elegy for Keats,

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having stood in the
window of his house,

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a museum on the Piazza Espagna.

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There was a lock of his hair
you were not allowed to touch--

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the color of balsa
or summer grass.

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The death mask lay on
the table by his bed.

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The window overlooked a cloud of
potted hydrangeas on the steps.

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But if you did not
look down, straight

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out there was only a pure
level of blue and absolute box

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of sky, the kind of view
ascribed to the dead.

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I told my friend I did
not feel his spirit.

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And in the very
room where he could

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have been the lamia or
even a Roman street thief

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when he lay in his
sick bed and watched

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the chalky hour before morning.

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The fever was erotic.

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The nightingale
did not love him.

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Its short elliptical
breaths were the effort

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to raise his root once,
imagining fat Madonnas blowing

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on their breakfast fires and
air glassing at the fringe--

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a sweat off the spirit which
could be Rafaello, or Autumn,

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or Christ, the seed of a man
hotter and briefer than the dark

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bitch of poetry."

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