Let’s dance with history’s heavy corpse tonight.
Let’s jig, amble, hustle, bump, grind, and shake
the dust off death’s grand mantelpiece. Let’s make
this ballroom glisten with misery and light.
Let’s raise that fetid thing and hold it tight,
dance cheek-to-cheek and breathe it in. Let’s take
photos, shoot a film, waltz the past awake
in show-time flicker. Let’s do this thing right.
See there—the Huns are thundering down the slope
on horseback, Spanish priests enforce their creed.
There’s the Klan’s burning cross, the lynch mob’s rope
(this dance floor’s got an endless loop to feed),
that man’s head bursting like a cantaloupe,
his wife’s vain stretch to gather every seed.
According to PBS, 475 people were killed
in US mass shootings in 2015, and nearly
43,000 Americans committed suicide in
2014, the highest rate since 1986.
A website posts the photos, ages, names
of bodies dropped along the gunman’s way.
That one girl seems baptized in her own blood.
Still charlatans elicit prophecy
from stars or palms, from guts or flights of birds,
and say they see in chaos a design.
Do you believe that there are signs that pointed
to her or point to others yet to be
who’ll dangle their angelic vertebrae
from rafters, bridges, closet hooks, doorframes?
The stars are balls of gas, you know. The line
that splits your palm cannot translate to words
of warning, hope, or dread. What’s understood?
Tonight, another head will be anointed.
My life began in 1964,
the same year as the Beatles’ first LP,
a year after Larkin says sex began,
a full six before Paul sang “Let It Be.”
The year I turned ten, Larkin started work
on his “Aubade”—his last, his best, his hell
that stewed for years. He thought his talent gone.
Meanwhile, Mick crooned “It’s Only Rock ’n Roll.”
I was thirteen when “Aubade” hit the Times
and Johnny Rotten snarled “God Save the Queen.”
Oblivious postmen walked from house to house,
and the spikes of Sid’s wristband gleamed like teeth.
“No future, no future,” the chorus wailed,
and only two years later Sid was gone.
And six years after that, somewhere near Hull,
they chiseled “Writer” into clay-white stone.
Today I read “This Living Hand” and felt
like Keats was sitting right across from me.
John sang “I Want to Hold Your Hand” when life
began to end so ordinarily.
The stilly murmur of the distant Sea
Tells us of silence.
—Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp”
Leigh Hunt and Keats wrote sonnets as a game
and surely, when finished, read them aloud.
I bet they had great fun that winter’s eve,
but they’re not writing sonnets anymore.
I try to keep alive dead poets’ names,
to pull their words up from a murky shroud.
Coleridge still tells of silence with his sea,
and Keats still speaks above the freshman’s snore.
You hear a lot of sounds in Keats’s work—
the gnats, the lambs, the crickets, all have voice.
He must have loved to hear, though given choice
preferred those sweeter melodies unheard.
In Rome, the sea’s too far away to hear
its murmur, even with a living ear.
The rusted rooster spins alone these days,
presiding over dust and emptiness
atop the barn’s dull spire. Late-summer haze
shimmers as his beak turns from east to west
to east to west again, metallic creak
the only soundtrack played for miles around.
No noisy mammals stir here, bold or meek.
No silent insects turn the silt-fine ground.
The rooster’s rusty groan is like a crow
that wakes up nothing every day and night.
His turns around his post aren’t fast or slow,
aren’t good or bad, aren’t true or wrong or right.
He just spins there as he did, without care,
when people were still here. Or anywhere.
© 2018. The Athenaeum Press at Coastal Carolina University.
All work copyright of their respective authors.