my friend Ellen whispered as we walked
the Spanish Steps after we stood beside the bed
Keats slept and died in. I too am done
wearing sunglasses to hide my eyes.
After a week in Italy, this strange acceptance,
after years of boomeranging, hair wild
with snakes, and patolli, oak-moss perfume,
my body unplunged from the bottom
of the river below Cascata Delle Mamore.
A few miles away the world’s tallest man-made
waterfall shoots up in a flurry of mist and Mozart
notes, a new equilibrium, intoxicating
in its calm. Ellen told me, when they cremated
Percy Shelley, Only his heart didn’t burn. She went on
to say, A heart can live 15 hours outside the body.
But I know what it’s like for a heart to fail
as my EKGs showed on the screen. But here
in Rome where friends Keats and Shelley
are buried near one another, we marveled at marble
sculptures of other dead, explored the emerald grounds
at the Cemetery for Foreigners, gaping at headstone
inscriptions, the red geraniums and palms
around the tombs, a white butterfly, where I sat
on rocks around Shelley’s tomb and unearthed
a feather at the foot of it. Gray with charcoal plumes
fanning out at the top. There was dust under my fingernails.
Dirt between my sandaled toes. His ashes below and beside me.
Cynthia Good, an award-winning poet, journalist and former TV news anchor, is the author of eight books including two poetry collections; In The Thaw of Day recently published by Finishing Line Press, as well as her chapbook, What We Do with Our Hands. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in numerous acclaimed publications including Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, South Shore Review, Terminus Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly and Waxing & Waning. An MFA graduate from NYU, Cynthia lives in Santa Monica and Mexico with her Havanese dog Zuni.