The Jacket-Pocket Keats
Joseph Salvatore Aversano
“The boat went down so quickly that Williams did not have time to kick off his boots, and Shelley thrust a new copy of Keats’s poems into his jacket pocket, so hard that it doubled-back and the spine split. This much was clear (but not much else) from the three bodies cast up along the coast 10 days later: they could be identified by their clothes, but not by their faces.”
— Richard Holmes in “Death and Destiny,” The Guardian (24.01.2004)
I.
nadir
high
the
first
of
the
light
glow’d
earthly
II.
fainted
wings
folded
flowers
of
the
grass
still
blown
III.
in
all
shells
ear’d
in
shape
the
found
voices
of
one
roar
IV.
on
isles
still
unheard
of
the
bards—
their
great
quiet
hymnèd—
die
content
V.
beauty
has
its
mists;
its
mists
have
their
mortal
loves
VI.
the
stars
and
spheres
blaze
completely
unharm’
d
Joseph Salvatore Aversano, a native New Yorker, currently lives on the central Anatolian steppe with his wife Asu. His poetry has been recently published in Bones, Die Leere Mitte, is/let, NOON: journal of the short poem, Otoliths and Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics. Joseph Salvatore Aversano is online at JosephSalvatoreAversano.com.