I CAN’T STOP LOVING YOU JOHN KEATS
by Kim Addonizio
Even though you’ve been dead for almost two hundred years, I feel like maybe
I could fall through a wormhole or get knocked on the head or go through some stones in Scotland
& somehow make my way to you, wearing a complicated bonnet of feathers & ribbons
with medicines sewn into my pantaloons under my white muslin dress
You’d fall for me & forget about Fanny Brawne & the big difference in our
ages, because
well, because that’s what I want to happen, John Keats, not the part where
your brother
grows pale & mist-rising-from-a-shorn-field-under-a-sky-of-whirling-
swallows-thin
& yes I’m sorry dies
but the part where we lie on the grass & drink French wine & you lay your
head on my breast
I can feel your eyelashes against my skin even here in the twenty-first
century
like the legs of a fly as it lands on a musk-rose while a tiny chorus hymns
around your head
That’s how much I fancy you, John Keats, like you’re an Amazon
fulfillment center far out in space
& I have a Groupon code for an intergalactic shopping spree
like you’re the star of a miniseries about a Romantic poet unsullied by
mycobacteria
& I’m a woman from the future changing literary history forever
writing your name in my diary while you steer our little boat out of Lethe
& into the lilies
trailing my hand in the canonical water
Please take me away in my tight corset & wedding dress of sand
I don’t want to stay in this world watching Truth bound & gagged on the
railroad tracks
feeling like a fish trapped in a European pedicure spa while the tiny,
whining violins of privilege play & Beauty slowly backs away
Kim Addonizio, “I Can’t Stop Loving You John Keats” from Now We’re Getting Somewhere Published by W.W. Norton and used by permission of Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents.
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