Listening to Keats
I could be listening to the news, but I’m listening to Keats
read by some honey-tongued young British actor
who, for all I know, might sound like Keats, his voice
lifted in pitch by my car’s tape deck running fast.
I’m on a one-day news fast, if I can manage it—one Tuesday
where everything that happens has to wait for Wednesday
for my response. And the Keats tape is important. Mailed to me
for my birthday by my daughter. And why Keats?
She was looking for tapes at Border’s, and possibly recalled
my wistful relationship with Keats, as I saw my mother—
dead lo these twenty years, once an English major—
weeping for Keats at the English Cemetery in Rome
when I was seven. I could read about it even now in her letters.
Keats, who sounds nothing like me. The mellifluous Keats
unbothered by the whine of trucks on the Massachusetts Turnpike,
Keats who could dance his syllables to a measure
while my lines are overcrowded, like a mouth needing orthodontia.
For years I wouldn’t read or read about Keats,
my mother’s great love, now given to me by my daughter,
twenty-three, the right age to meet Keats, who’s twenty-five
(at most) forever. How he blazes with a love of love,
youth’s great initial discovery, on moon-glinting St. Agnes Eve,
and feels, too, the fresh frost of early death,
his brain still teeming, no chance to set it all down.
And how he knows not to lift all his poems
to some grand sentiment, but to end with an image,
some forester in the cold—these poems in the porches of my ears.
How my mother must have loved him, since he could say
what my father couldn’t: about a man’s desperate love,
a woman’s merciless beauty. My father who called to chat
on the day that happened to be my birthday, but couldn’t just say
Happy Birthday. So, hey, I said it for him,
I wouldn’t change him. Or anything else at this moment,
except to have my daughter nearer, though I feel near to her
listening to Keats—my mother, my daughter, me—
passing trucks, moving through the toll booths,
the dead Keats reading passionately, deathlessly.