I didn’t understand Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”
until I was terminal, which when you think about it, how else are you supposed
to understand lines like My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains, or My sense,
as though of hemlock I had drunk? I mean, it was like the other day when I grabbed
a pillow, placed it on the red Adirondack chair in our front yard, sat there listening
to a song sparrow singing its ass off, along with a robin cheery-upping so damn much
(beyond ironic). Some dull opiate, indeed! Ode, schmode, I was thinking, though
I do love a praise song, am thankful and glad to proclaim that not only can I watch
two eagles copulating in the tippy-top of a Western Red Cedar, cry because
they’ve found each other, are something like in love, and because earlier I saw them
doing a locked-talons flip-glide over the lake, but because I can get myself out of bed,
wash my face, brush my teeth. No nightingales here in Seattle, but you get my approximate
drift. Sunburnt mirth! I totally get it, as well as a beaker full of the warm South,
which could be Death Valley, Cadiz, or fucking Matera! Some lady on YouTube
said Keats is drunk at this point in the poem, but my take is he’s contemplating
suicide–a bubbly cocktail to snuff himself out because let’s face it: being tubercular
is worse than ALS: he shook and groaned with pain, whereas all I’m dealing with
is The weariness, a tad of fret. My gray hairs aren’t even shaking, but a friend
I haven’t spoken to in over 40 years sent me a bouquet: pink roses and purple peas!
I wonder, though, about those viewless wings of Poesy. Is that where we trot out
this thing called negative capability? Did he want us to figure out why poesy
is viewless, or did he want us to be in uncertainy? His brain is dull, as I’m sure
mine will soon be, and shit, here there is no light is quite the heavy, but there are flowers
on my table, and I remember Peggy, the red-haired girl who lived in Tofu House,
raised by her grandparents cuz she was the eighth kid in an Irish brood–her parents
done with raising kids. Embalmed darkness, which reminds me I need to figure out
who’s doing my cremation, or maybe pony up for Recompose. I’d prefer it if the days
were shortening, if the plum tree across the street wasn’t wildly bursting into bloom,
but whaddya gonna do but listen to the downies, crows, and Steller’s Jays, watch them
hop from budded-to-budded branch? We’ve even got these from-who-knows-where
violets cropping up in our weedy beds, along with a murmurous haunt of flies,
which maybe I’ll stick with cremation. Yeah, I think I finally get this poem—
I was never half in love with easeful Death—when I thought about my quiet breath,
when I thought now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight
with no pain, cuz who the fuck wants to be in pain? Yet, if I knock myself off too soon,
my family won’t get that big fat check, plus no more dee-dee-dee
of chickadees. Uncertainly, he calls Adieu! adieu! I guess the nightingale’s
petering out, which is also Keats’ poesy, no? Something’s buried deep,
though hopefully the music never flees, the music that is poetry.
Martha’s most recent collection is Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019). She is the 2023 winner of the Blue Lynx Prize; her book, This One We Call Ours, will appear from Lynx House Press in the fall of 2024. Martha’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and The Best American Poetry series, among others. Her website is available at marthasilano.net