FEATURED POEM: “At the Keats-Shelley House”
If you’re a poet writing in English, and you find yourself in Rome, you are almost obligated to make a pilgrimage to the Keats-Shelley House, conveniently located next to the famous Spanish Steps. Keats died there from tuberculosis in 1821 at the age of 25.
I made my first pilgrimage in 2017 with Dan Ware and Toto Tours over the Christmas holiday. My second visit was in 2022 while in a poetry workshop with Kim Addonizio at La Romita in Umbria, where I first drafted this poem. I’m delighted it was just published in the 2025 issue of the Connecticut River Review from the Connecticut Poetry Society.
AT THE KEATS-SHELLEY HOUSE
Keats! I’m standing in your bedroom,
looking out the window onto the Spanish Steps.
Bernini’s little boat is still moored in the fountain,
and schoolchildren in matching T-shirts throng the stairs,
unaware that next to them, long ago, your life ended.
The heat of the Roman summer is upon us,
and I imagine you consumed by fever,
soaking the sheets of your bed.
I have tears in my eyes––and I’m surprised I do.
I confess I’m not as familiar with your work
as I who claim to be a poet should be.
So it’s not that I mourn the loss
of your genius at such an early age
or regret the odes of which we’re surely deprived.
Rather, I’m touched by your history––
your mother abandoning you, how you nursed
your dying brother and then saw blood
from your own lungs on a handkerchief.
I lost my mother, too––to diseases of the mind
that robbed her of any tenderness––
and I recall lying in my one-room apartment
in the early days of AIDS––feverish, waiting
for test results, thrush like awful lilies in my mouth.
It turned out I had some other virus––
nasty, but not deadly.
Still, I sympathize with you, John––
a motherless boy barely twenty-five,
so tortured by pain and sorrow that he wrote,
Now more than ever seems it rich to die.
But I’ve surprised myself again, Keats,
for I find I cry not just in sadness for a boy who died,
but with relief––here in my seventh decade––
for one who survived.
READ SOME OTHER POEMS (Click on the hot-linked grey text)
“The Prize,” Indianapolis Review, Spring 2025
“Boy Jumping Off a Cliff,” “Audrey Hepburn and the Southern Belle Soirée,” and “Highway at Night,” South Florida Poetry Journal, Issue #33, May 2024 (scroll down; poems are alphabetical by author’s last name)
“A Friend Writes from Paris” and “Inventory,” The Inquisitive Eater (New School Food), 2024
“Red Geraniums,” The Rainbow Project (Poets Wear Prada)
“Act III” and “Lo Stadio dei Marmi, Rome," Inlandia Journal
“Sonnet with Birch Trees, Tatars, and Crayolas” Cider Press Review, Vol.25 Issue #1
“Vocabulary Lesson,” Verse Daily
“Somewhere in Georgia” and “Belated Valentine for Alex,” Under a Warm Green Linden
“The Death of Heidegger,” Penn Review
“Christ of the Frogs, with Thieves,” “Catchment,” and “Operating Instructions” Full Bleed, (Maryland Institute College of Art)
“On the Sayville Ferry,” The Westchester Review
“Boy, Stepping from the Shower, a Towel around His Waist,” Full Bleed, (Maryland Institute College of Art)
“December 31st,” The Inquisitive Eater (New School Food)
“At the Precise Moment of the Solstice” and “First Encounter,” Marathon Literary Review (Arcadia University, Philadelphia)
“Monet vs. The International Pop Art Exhibit,” Honorable Mention, E. E. Cummings Prize, New England Poetry Club.
“Cytokinesophobia,” Palette Poetry
“At the Shrine of Moinuddin Chisti,” Podium, an online publication of the Unterberg Poetry Center at New York’s 92nd StreetY
“Beneath Me,” all the sins
“Questions for Anthropophogists” - The Inquisitive Eater (New School Food)
“Predilections of the Carnivores” - The Inquisitive Eater (New School Food)
“Self-Driving Tesla Involved in Fatal Crash” - New Verse News
“Correction” - New Verse News