What's in the air today of young Johnny Keats?
Sitting on the Spanish Steps and on a bench, beside a cat, in the cemetery where lies John Keats, and a thousand others, Shelley's ashes and Antonio Gramsci's, and the remains, somewhat beneath Shelley, of Gregory Corso. It's a long way from Greenwich Village or even San Francisco to the Protestant Cemetery of Rome. But it is to Keats' grave that the school kids and tourists gravitate. There is no name on his grave. Sit on the Spanish Steps next to Keats' residence, through the wall where he'd suffered, far from England and Fanny, and watch the anonymous, fleeting strangers, and feel him. On a bench where a stray cat has come, collection boxes around for the cats, the entrance... |