How wrong The New Yorker and the Moderns were, trying to say
what poetry was. The symbol and the image
and a bit less rhyme, estrangement and the street lamp,
a guy talking to himself on 33rd and Third. What
an insult to imagination—and death, which closed imagination down.
Diane Seuss sold her copy of “Modern Poetry” and went to Rome.
—“Keats’s death room. His deathbed, a facsimile.
Everything he touched was burned”—
(Because they had to kill the germs)
and she discovered poetry
kissing his death mask and thinking
of her fetal blood lost in the sewers;
everything in the past stinking,
only poetry able to remember
the body, just before it crumbled in ember,
Romanticism the greatest throwing off of all—
worse than your ailments, your modernism, your modern thrall.