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Redbud

Betsy Sholl 
I had to step outside, having just finished
the letters of Keats, who for all his talk of easeful death,
 told his friend Brown he wanted to live, wanted his feeling
for light and shade, his memories of walking with her—
everything reminds him.  Oh God!  God!  God!—
he was barely able to write it, I should have had her
when I was in health.  Does that mean what it sounds like to us?
Window light and leaf shade on the porch.  Next door,
people slipping into their coats, leaving a party.  See ya.  Take it easy.
Hard to believe just last week, I looked up to see a blue truck 
crest the hill, flying it seemed, and the driver’s surprised eyes 
as he fishtailed into me.  Barely time to ask, Am I going to die?
But nobody did, so can I say it was worth it?  say the beauty
totaled my car—the stand of redbuds I’d gone to see, purple blossoms
on rain-slick limbs, stark as petals on a painted scroll blooming
above waterfalls, above tiny figures on a foot bridge crossing
a steep gorge.  There we were, waiting for a trooper in that fellow’s cab,
and it seemed he had to tell how he got caught cheating his boss
at the stables, how he was planning to leave a whole mess
of bad credit, racing stubs, a woman who finally said,  Get out.
Beauty must have been a kind of charm he knew how to use,
aqua eyes, easy smile, the way he could tell his scam and still run it, 
share a thermos, ask ideas for his new name.  All around us, those redbuds 
so stunning I can’t remember now if he drugged a horse,
or fixed a race, dealt off the bottom with his fine jittery hands.
I had Keats in my pocket, himself worried about money,
walking through Scotland to see its waterfalls, astonished
by what he hadn’t imagined, the subtleties of tone—moss, rock-weed— 
I live in the eye he sys to his brother.  But they’re gone—
Keats, Fanny, Tom, everyone he wrote those exuberant letter to.
What good is beauty?   Still I saw it, those redbuds, like the moment
making love, into the rush of it, when you think, I could die now. 
After which – the truck, that fellow telling the trooper flat out
he was doing 50 in a 25, as if beauty has to press its luck,
which the insurance company said had run out:
we’ll get him, don’t you worry.  I don’t.
Because he’s gone, among the tossing heads of horses,
their nervous sidesteps—gone, without a name,
like those tiny figures dissolving in paint.  Imagine,
standing over a gorge where a waterfall plummets—lost,
not so much in thought as its graceful absence, so lost
there is nothing else to want from the world.  The world.
How beautiful the word sounds.  Whorled.  Purple blossoms
on rain-black trees.  The enormous eyes of horses.  Rock-weed, slate.
The world loving us, who probably have never loved enough,
never dared let ourselves go that far into its beauty.
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