The Sand Hill Review http://www.sandhillreview.org 2005

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