When I Read Keats

“…And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,…”

lines 58-61, Ode to Psyche, 1819


When I read Keats I want to cut the cake
and pass it round to everyone: insist that all of its
fat buttercream and crumb be licked and chewed –
consumed until each rumble in each stomach has been
fed – not silenced: resolutely led to some sweet new
low resonant experience of the replete: so we might
then resume the enterprise of living in the world

as if it were complete. When I read Keats I want
to layer all noetic dolor with poetic color: tell the intellect
to recollect its instincts: to think sweat precisely
when it used to think philosophy. When I read Keats
I want to follow every hunch: I want the world
to fight me back: alert me to the liveness of a punch.
When I read Keats I want the taste of blood to marry

with the flood of every yearning dream of love:
a sweetness with a tang: a neatness in my cadences
and rhymes which tightens to intolerable brightness:
bangs against and blasts away all time. When I read
Keats I learn that beauty is as close as we can get
to death; provides us with the best inducement
we can know to want to take another breath.

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