December 17, 2024: "Rome in June," Exhausted, Sacred Spaces

Final grades are submitted, and I am the walking dead tonight.  I barely have the brain power to string a coherent sentence together.  After I'm done typing these few words, I am going to put my head on a pillow and sleep so hard that I may miss the rapture if it happens.

Billy Collins goes Keats hunting in Rome . . . 

Rome in June

by: Billy Collins

There was a lot to notice that morning

in the Church of Saint Dorothy, virgin martyr--

a statue of Mary with a halo of electric lights,

a faded painting of a saint in flight,

Joseph of Copertino, as it turned out,

and an illustration above a side altar

bearing the title "The Musical Ecstasy of St. Francis."

But what struck me in a special way

like a pebble striking the forehead

was the realization that the simple design

running up the interior of a church's dome

was identical to the design on the ceiling

of the room by the Spanish Steps

where Keats had died and where I

had stood with lifted eyes just the day before.

It was nothing more than a row

of squares, each with the carved head

of a white flower on a background of blue, 

but all during the priest's sermon

(which was either about the Wedding at Cana

or the miracle of the loaves and fishes

as far as my Italian could tell)

I was staring at the same image

that the author of Hyperion had stared at

from his death bed as he was being devoured by tuberculosis.

It was worth coming to Rome

if only to see what supine Keats was beholding

just before there would be no more Keats,

only Shelley, not yet swallowed by a wave,

and Byron before his Greek fever,

and Wordsworth who outlived Romanticism itself.

And it pays to lift the eyes, I thought outside the church

were a man on a bench was reading a newspaper,

a woman scolding her child,

and the heavy sky, visible above the narrow streets

of Trastevere, was in the process

of breaking up, showing segments of blue

and the occasional flash of Roman sunlight.

Again, no brain power tonight.  I hope to feel human by tomorrow, but there are no guarantees.  

I love Collins' narrative in today's poem, him standing in the room where Keats died of tuberculosis.  There are few places I've visited in my life that hold the same sort of sacred energy for me.  Some churches--Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, in particular.  Some historic landmarks--Pearl Harbor in Hawaii nearly destroyed me.  Some places attached to writers I admire--the root cellar of Roethke House in Saginaw felt like I was breathing poetry.  The very air in these spaces seems sacred.

But then there are ordinary sacred spaces, as well.  For me, tonight, recovering from some long days of grading and schoolwork, my couch feels pretty damn sacred.  Plus, my puppy is next to me, nudging my hand with her nose.  

Saint Marty can give thanks for that.