Free Darling Clementine by Andrew Klavan Page B

lopsided flag passageways hand in hand, reading inscriptions to one another.
    Of course, somewhere in the dark, distant plains and caves of Blumenthal Country, I must have known that Keats was buried here. Maybe that even added to the mingled sense of surprise and recognition I felt when I stumbled upon his grave in a plainer, less baroque section of the cemetery.
    Keats had asked that only the words “Here lies one whose name is writ on water,” be inscribed on the stone, but his mourning friends could not bear the simplicity and added a lot of muck about how the anonymous “young poet” had asked for that inscription in “the bitterness of his heart,” complete with a broken lyre by Severn of which he later rightly repented. To make matters worse, some idiot had hung another inscription on a nearby wall more recently, an acrostic poem in which each line began with a letter of Keats’ name. Can you imagine? “K is for the Krazy rhymes you gave us. E is for the era of which you wrote.” I reflected bitterly that no one had let him be, let him die with his own, real great misery spoken plain. Unable to bear his “Father, why have you forsaken me?” they had covered it over with graffiti, as Christ’s was washed down, like a bitter pill, with bread and wine.
    Arthur had respectfully moved away to leave me alone at the desecrated shrine of my fallen idol. As the gloaming deepened, I turned and saw the grave of Severn, who had lived into his 80’s, long enough, said the stone, to see “his friend lionized,” and then been buried here beside the youth who had fallen to his care through accident and kindness, whom he had nursed to the end of his life when he himself was just at the beginning of his life, who, in the few months they had known each other, had cried out the pain of his obscurity into the painter’s ear and so kissed him with immortality.
    And in that space between the graves, that empty, somehow human space, Keats came to me; not Keats the Lord, but Keats the man, wavering, electric if invisible, from his own stone to that of him who had been not his St. Peter, but his friend.
    I was, that is to say, touched by a mortal sadness: the orphan Keats; Keats five foot tall; Keats doomed, as Seamus Heaney says, to the decent thing; psychologically paralyzed when he needed to find work; one of his brothers dying, one of them cheating him, “Oh, would that anything good had ever happened to me or my brothers!”; Keats hysterically in love, chaste, panicky, confused; hungry for fame: “Wasting his salvation on a fierce miscreed”; Keats writing the odes of April, singing only as birds sing, naturally; Keats, I imagine, all in all: Keats the Beautiful Neurotic. A guy.
    Then the rippling purple light folded over me and the moment ended.
    â€œWhat do you think this weekend, hon?” calls Arthur, from where he is lying on the couch under a tent made of the newspaper he is holding above him. “‘Cats,’ or ‘La Cage Aux Folles’?”
    Thinking of Rome, as I say, reminds me of Keats, and thinking of the similarity between Keats and Christ reminds me of the similarities between Rome and America. Greece and Rome, I should say, and England and America. It sometimes strikes me that, taken at their broadest outlines, the histories are identical. A loosely-connected empire built on naval power, a people with a democratic nature, great writers and, I mean, how can you tell a faggot from an Athenian?—anyway, Greece, and later England, giving way to this great thump and thunder of a garish yet wan republic, its artistic heart self-conscious, inferior, imitative of the old, dying democracy, but its real passion for building, making, taking—Italo-American yang to Greco-English yin—its canvas of conservatism (remember the speeches of Augustus, all old-fashioned values, and religion and decency while taking the freedoms of the