A Common Experience, but with Certain Particulars

(for Keats)

Mists, for what they were, obscured dark blue
You were up there and saw
Somehow, the siege of death’s
Rancor, snow white noise
Crashing out of the inevitable
Body, pure spirit you
Still stranglehold sand like
An abstract thought
What you taught to the future
Means nothing to the past
It is a place
And all those things can be left
Behind a paperbound hall of visions
I sing all of them and want to
Know more, am yet nothing
But the Rosetta of that
Schoolyard girl’s bright image,
Helen in her living peak,
I am nothing, and all but
Nothing, we are brothers
And we are sisters.
It is a common experience,
But with certain particulars,
A tree by your window,
The sparrow pecking the Gravel.
We are each other
For a moment forever.