Keats Is Coughing

Everything is made of everything. — Leonardo da Vinci I found Rome in the woods. Fair to admit it’s mostly tundra to the west in the park, past Toklat the Denali I revised, low grasslands engineered to freeze deep by October — this being Alaska — the great Tabularium close to the Temple of Castor and Pollux I rebuilt that same summer — not superimposed, exact as any scheme in secret — the Arch of Septimius Severus at the gravel bar where fox drank from a river turned stream, a Theater of Marcellus near the ranger station where one raven, such a brat, complained of my Circus Maximus, Trajan’s Column, my Baths of Diocletian, too many spots soaked in unpronounceable Latin. I really did, I shouldered bits of it, a ruin-hushed haunted business, my brain a truck bed, a lift, pulleys big as a whale’s heart, expletives of cheap wonder all over my woodlot and expanse. One self-anoints to embellish day, years, life thus far, and think oneself so ... Then busted — by a raven! Well, that’s memory for you, that’s so-called civilization for you, to layer up, to redo the already done. I mean it’s a fact, the puny life span we’re allotted. And proof — Denali in August, fireweed, spunky scrawny first Latinate —Erechtites hieracifolia— giving off flowers to mark what weeks left, little time bomber, time traveler, ancient slips red-flagging the countdown to winter by climbing its own stalk. Something perverse about that. Something perfectly fiendishly self-conscious about that. • From the start perverse, any premise. Ask ... We can’t know. To be compelled makes an occasion. Rome’s grand past horrific, fire and ash, swamp into bog, lust and bloodlust — The Alaska Range dreams lurid as Rome, the worst way below being fire, summer snow at night off the highest peaks by noon as distant from our cabin as the size of a hand if I held up the one with an eye in the middle to know how this works. Some have the power to raise from the dead a before, before scary and beautiful back to mystery cults, in caves, rubble far under a Roman street, the altar to Mithras still slaying his bull, crumbling the stonework. All things being equal. But they’re not. Agony, it’s older. Ask the moose at Denali, the snowshoe hare, the lynx, such a wily courtly lot. Ask Ovid banished to his hovel on the Black Sea, aching for Rome’s exalted rude cacophony, each exiled month a big thick X down Februarius, Aprilis to home-shattered sick enough for an undersong. Look it up!Undersong: a strain; a droning; the burden of a song —