A Sail to Great Island

Listening to Keats

5 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 will have to wait till Wednesday for my response. And the Keats tape is important. Mailed to me for my birthday from my daughter. She was looking for tapes at Borders, and possibly recalled my wistful relationship with Keats, seeing 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, young enough to date 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. 6 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. Or didn’t remember. 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, and me, passing trucks, going through the toll booths, the dead Keats reading passionately, deathlessly. ...