heard melodies are sweet

I didn't post a poem yesterday, and then I had kind of a bad night -- insomnia, which sometimes happens -- and this morning I feel a little bit like I was run over by a truck, because not sleeping is actually really bad for you. On the plus side, here is a poem about John Keats.

After two weeks under the Italian sun,
he would dash off a note to Fanny Brawne:
"Weather marvellous. Fully recovered.
Come soon and bring summer dresses."
And she would come. She would pull
his miraculous heart to her breast,
and they would listen to every bird's song.
The odes would win a silly contest,
and they would use the prize money
to build a small house on a Greek island.
They would spend the next twenty years
perfecting the art of the human body.
They would eat fine olives and swallow
the sound of each wave's roll onto the beach.
They would make love under the night sky
with such tense clarity that the moon
would become the bright face of God.
One morning the man would pick up his pen,
sit by the window, write, "I was happy
to be John Keats," and never write again.

—Dan Albergotti, "Revision." Originally printed in The Virginia Quarterly Review, 81.4 (Fall 2005).

One of my favorite things in poetry -- and, indeed, in literature in general -- is poets writing about other poets. This may turn out to be something of a theme.