I Thought I Saw John Keats Last Night

I thought I saw John Keats last night.

I can’t be sure. We’ve never met.

Half-lit beneath the streetlamp’s light,

his cough was deep and rough and wet.

He had his collar pulled up high.

He shuddered in the misting rain.

I saw his breath. A prayer. A sigh. 

Some music from his teeming brain.

The bookie rushed past to the store.

The music pounded from the car.

The girl ran toward the open door.

A fight called from the corner bar.

The memories that crowd me out.

The one who sobbed and grieved and died.

Indulgences of rage and doubt.

Confessions little, lost, and lied.

I thought I saw John Keats last night.

I can’t be sure. We’ve never met.

Perhaps he went to watch the fight.

Or see the girl. Or pay a debt.
His face was soaked with rain and sweat.

I thought I saw John Keats last night.
The passing phantoms swallowed him.
His eyes were damp and dark and dim.
I caught them in the streetlamp's light.
Time out of joint then put to right.
Intruding vision, set to flight.

Amos

“Do two walk together, unless they have agreed to do so?”

His name was Amos and his blackness stood

against the sky like ash upon a sheet.

I watched him as he wrestled out the shapes

to carve a garden from the cluttered beds.

His clothing never changed: the patterned shirt,

stained overalls, the brown boots cracked like skin.

His knobby hands, his bowed knees, walking slow,

the silence of his pain when bending down.

My mother sent me out to help him work.

She warned me I should not get in his way.

St. Louis, ’62, a fierce July.

The molten air sat hard on everyone.

I wanted overalls like Amos had.

My mother said “You’ll melt!” and gave me shorts.

So every day I breathed him as he worked,

the sweat that stained his clothes and ringed his hat.

A sweat of okra, lard, and greens and pork,

exotic to me as his phlegmy laugh.

My child’s hands could scarcely grasp the tools.

He shared his jar of water even so.

Any icy jar he kept tucked in the shade.

It sweated, too: slim rivulets of tears.

There were so many things we did not know:

The loss to come, my father gone, the grief.

How we were tilling gardens for the ones

Who’d take this house, strangers, the waiting ghosts.

We did not know; and so we simply worked.

Two diggers, side by side, our fingers caked.

*

At sixty, I come in from cutting wood,

a final try to save a dying birch.

Tonight the rain will come; the air is thick.

My knees betray the storm across the lake.

I fill a mason jar and take a drink.

A long, slow draw. And there he is again.

A memory made fresh, a phantom limb.  

My nostrils filling with his strong, sweet scent.