A Garland of Light

^{to the memory of Robert Hayden}

I had taken a long walk from my hotel near the Colosseum
past the antique earth colors of ruins at the Forum
down busy, traffic-laden streets to the Trevi Fountain,
its lip ringed with throngs of tourists snapping selfies—
a father bending to the waters and cupping his hands
to offer his toddler son a cool drink amidst the glister,
sculptures of the gods serene but spouting an abundance
that lapped gorgeously over carved stone to the brilliant, 
pooling fan that made this upwelling a semicircle of the bucolic.
I moved through to a kind of winding approach to the Steps
and descended, picking through the patches of crowds
huddled in an angling shade cast by the Keats-Shelley House. 

On the street before the fountaining Bernini boat in the piazza,
I button-hooked into the entrance and climbed wooden stairs,
paid my fee to the smiling attendant, and entered the sacred rooms:
a kind of library with long walls lined with books, busts of Keats 
and Shelley, glass cases of miscellaneous manuscripts,
wispy locks of their tawny hair, other small trinkets of their lives.
In Severn’s room, the small chamber adjacent to where Keats died,
I found a printed card and read the words of Charles Cowden Clark, 
Keats’ boyhood friend, telling how, after the poet had left Enfield School 
to apprentice to an apothecary at a village two miles away, 
they’d still meet, “five to six times a month,” Keats with book in hand,
so they might sit at an arbor at the edge of a spacious garden 
to while away a leisure hour with “good talk” of The Faerie Queene
“to note the spark that fired the train of his poetical tendencies …”

But a reflection on the glass shone through the transparency of years—
a frosted flame of thought that took me back through the inactive pages of my life—
and I was humbled to recall my own student time—23 in Ann Arbor,
fresh from Japan and my monastery year—sitting with Robert Hayden in his garden.
It was fall term and I’d pursued him, asking for conference hours.
He dismissed all my suggestions and simply said, “We shall read Keats,”
inviting me to have tea every Monday afternoon at his house.  
I’d ride a borrowed woman’s Schwinn, my books in a wicker basket,
and he’d be there reading on his porch, rising to greet me
like a streetlamp looming over autumn blossoms, Coke-bottle
glasses gleaming at their rims, red or yellow bow-tie at his wrinkled neck,
the white dress shirt flapping lightly in the breezes like drying laundry,
his hair Brilliantined and scented with a light, floral trace. 

I never took one note, instead listened intently to his pure voice, 
murmuring the great lines … as though of hemlock
                                                                                         I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past and Lethe-wards had sunk …
                                                            In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless …
while the garden swam in flurries of light around us—
white gladiolas, tumbles of trumpet blossoms, a vine of wisteria
yet to bloom snarling over a dingy trellis shading the gate.

He taught me rhythm, phrasing, attention for metaphor, 
the organic and spectral weave of syntax coiling to simile,
design all in shadow until the burst that reveals the shining figure
alit with clarified thought, Tasting of Flora and the country green …
the deep, delved earth … Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth.
The man who, in his own poems, told of slave ships, rebellions,
great leaders of his race—El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz—
chronic angers and love’s obscure and lonely offices …

What did I know? And did I know that his gift to me
was a mirror of mutual affections refracted through 
the burbling Hippocrene from over a century before
when vows once spoke between two friends remain 
through the pastoral eglantine … like crimson dyed in grain…?
He was a man who like a breath ascends amidst the roil of years, 
who gave me the utter sound of words like a water-writ script 
rolling gently as a garland of light on the swells of a fountain.