B
"At one time or another he seriously considered becoming a physician
at Edinburgh hospital; a ship's surgeon
aboard an Indiaman; a professional dramatist
at Drury Lane; a literary
journalist for the London Magazine; a tea
merchant in the City of London; a freedom
fighter
with Simon Bolivar
in Brazil; and most bizarre
of all, as advised (surely provokingly) by the family
solicitor Abbey, a hatmaker
in the West End."
Richard Holmes, "John Keats Lives,"
New York Review of Books, 11/7/2013

C
We sat around the table with T.P. Roche discussing the Faerie Queene. I did not know who I was then. He spoke of how the Roches rivaled the Spensers in protestant Ireland. He told me to read Richardson—I didn't—he told me I would always make a living b/c the world would always pay for comedy. I was a waste of his thought, his time, his seat.

D
"It went down soft pulpy, slushy, oozy—all its delicious embonpoint..."
Holmes, "Keats," NYRB
quoting Keats on nectarines

E
I am off-track faculty trying to teach the Faerie Queene at Princeton, Williams, Rice, the University of Saskatchewan (in Saskatoon).

and then ((((you)))) and (eye) saw, at the Broken cAlorimetry of Mew-sick that Belgian dance-waffle, and eye thought that maybe only two-dimensional lines on a page, writ or drawn, could represent

though they say that T.S. Eliot dropped to his knees before Michelangelo's Pieta, surprising his group on a passage to Italy

even

that dry crustacean
that nervous eosinophil
that awkward veil

thought to fall

(that banking swain)
(that piping latitude)

Gaunt years, only salvageable because they are gone.

You don't have to do anything.
Just be.
Be, in essence.
Missing gaunt years.
Missing lone years gone.
Having been given
the opportunity to miss one's misery.