University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada 18 April 1997

Dying Scarlet

by Tim Bowling

"I have had a great deal of pleasant time with Rice lately, and am getting initiated into a little band-they call drinking deep dying scarlet."

- Keats to his brothers, January, 1818

John Keats and his circle in their cups

died scarlet. And the poet's life

to its dregs did the same, his linen

bedsheets and nightshirt finely spotted.

The world loves him for drinking so deep

from the few years he had, for those pretty

tipples he took from his days' good wine;

the world honours blood flushed in a pale

brow that bends above the blank pages in candle-

flicker, giving joy, believing. Vitality

is beautiful even coughed on a lace cuff,

o little red cosmos, little red heaven,

that last faint breath exhaled before dust

and the cold grave smothered his youth.

I don't know anything certain about the dead

except they're gone, young Keats and his brothers,

the two women named Fanny he loved, his friends,

the publishers who respected his art, the guardian

who didn't, Shelley with a drowned volume in his

shirt-pocket under Italian stars, gone. A century

of letter-writing, gossip, tuberculosis and poems.

And I don't know where the spirit of any poet goes

if it doesn't die scarlet wherever it can, Keats's

joy in October sunsets over the Adams River, full in

the salmon's scales as they scrabble to spawn before

the air eats to nothing their lace-threaded bones,

Keats's fear in the eyes of the ring-necked pheasant

shot out of its heart in the blue skies of my marshland

home, the long script of its bright death trailing

off into the ditches and rushes. I have heard the music

of his lines gasped from a thousand slack jaws

while the world stood crowded on the riverbanks,

amazed; my hands have touched the spots of his truth

on a thousand downed wings still quivering in frost.

In my wrists live the ghosts of all the words

ever written in his, and his Queen's, English;

they gather in my pulses, drinking life, dying scarlet,

unrestrained in their gaiety and rowdiness, dying

like the salmon and the pheasant and the flushed

eves of fall, dying as a poet dies, face turned

towards what's left of his life, the spatter

of his joy's heaven on his clothes,

the light going out on his page forever, the wax

of the last candle on his nightstand melted down,

as he lies grieving for every second he's lost

of the sun: I don't expect to know the vivid dawn

that finally dissolved the gay circle of Keats,

but if I'm blessed to die scarlet on my native ground,

let the wind dig a grave for my pallid song.

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