To Keat’s Urn

     Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
          A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme

                                                —John Keats

And none more sweet than your rhyme, John Keats,
and none more true to love and beauty,
none more unabashed in heart and song.

And, whether by chance or not, each time
we come back to it, we find ourselves
savoring what we have overthrown,

and find ourselves warmed and delighted¾
but then puzzled, disturbed, as the why?
of our rejecting settles on us.

We are not inclined to let you stay,
with your songs to beauty, your young heart,
so knowing are we of love’s deceit

and so precious to us our despair.
(Even I will disarrange these words
of their music, for I’d have them seen.)

You are the unheard melody now;
you, the lost lesson, the last teacher
of the heart truly broken by love.

When you put your words against the loss,
words where soft flesh might have been a life,
and carved your white urn of poesy

for turning this way and that in changed
light, and put all your burning heart’s truth
to the test of joy and forever,

and to the test of friendship amidst
our later woe, how could you have known
you gave to us too much of beauty?

            *             *             *

in our time, John,
          we never speak in capitals
          you won’t catch us writing
                   Beauty, Truth
                   (Love or Heart)
          we never sing

in our time
          we make facts, factoids, texts, and contexts
          even our eyes write modest little pictures
                   and our tongues lull the language
          everyone, John, keeps the sublime
                   from themselves or failing
                   to themselves
                   (themselves closet for its bones)
there are almost no poets
                   (as you knew them)
          nor poems
                   (as you knew them)

          instead a surfeit of texts
          strange forays
                   into the narrows of irony
                   or across the barrens of intellect
                   (prairies of silence)
                   (why make a sound a poem at all?)

          so that chisled into this modern urn is
                   our overwrought intelligence
                   our well-worked humility

                   nothing yearning, nothing needing
                             to break
                             free

in our time we know
          terrible things about the world that is
          ourselves

          we know
                   the whole of human existence
                   is the flicker of a wing

we know
                   the earth dies in the arms of our sun
                   then our sun, then our universe¾
                   in blackness or white fire

          and know
                   no god is required

          and know so well
                   our own made means to ends

                   our chemistries and pestilences
                   our death camps and fire storms
                   our fabulous machineries
                   (realities, John, unimaginable)

and have known already
                   a hundred years of death

          it so loosed upon us by us
          so lodged
                   in the human voice

that in our time
          we cannot sing
                   or dare not sing
                             or would not sing

  and songless, our eyes have everything to take on
          and, it being everything, they
                   cannot bear up
         

the images soon unravel
          the eyes fix blindly
                   to a stare
         

the poems are now unstirring air

          (and we know no god

was required)

            *             *             *

Forever and decay is where the error is.

How you could not abide the downward flux,
how love would not stay love nor beauty, beauty;
how you wrote consummately the unconsummated
moment toward eternity and found some solace there:
the lips nearly kissed, the youthful bodies nearly coupled,
eternal fairness, love and longing and spirit ditties
fixed in a stone of words, in a bittersweet protection.

I have spent my twenty years of passion
husbanding the same foolishness of heart:  that words
would win and hold or prove or perpetuate
what was as fleeting as my lover’s heightened breath.

I made fine words.  To no avail.  And made a suffering
where with but a letting go I could have kissed a timeless joy.

            *             *             *

And I think too
          of Blake’s other law¾

                   how a grain of sand is a universe
                   and the Universe a grain of sand

                   how therefore every poem
                   must seek the Tyger

                   how that Symmetry
                   must always threaten

                   how there is no poem
                   small enough to hide in

                   how no life is small
                   though the village is empty now

                   how the huge sings in the smallest
                   atom, the smallest life

                   and how in these
                   a huge song waits to sing out.

David Cummings