SCIROCCO by Jorie Graham
In Rome, at 26 Piazza di Spagna, at the foot of a long flight of stairs, are rooms let to Keats in 1820, where he died. Now you can visit them, the tiny terrace, the bedroom. The scraps of paper on which he wrote lines are kept behind glass, some yellowing, some xeroxed or mimeographed.⊠Outside his window you can hear the scirocco working the invisible. Every dry leaf of ivy is fingered, refingered. Who is the nervous spirit of this world that must go over and over what it already knows, what is it so hot and dry thatâs looking through us, by us, for its answer? In the arbor on the terrace the stark hellenic forms of grapes have appeared. Theyâll soften till weak enough to enter our world, translating helplessly from the beautiful to the true.⊠Whatever the spirit, the thickening grapes are part of its looking, and the slow hands that made this mask of Keats in his other life, and the old woman, the memorialâs custodian, sitting on the porch beneath the arbor sorting chick-peas from pebbles into her cast-iron pot. See what her hands knowâ they are its breath, its mother tongue, dividing, discarding. There is light playing over the leaves, over her face, making her abstract, making her quick and strange. But she has no care for what speckles her, changing her, she is at her work. Oh how we want to be taken and changed, want to be mended by what we enter. Is it thus with the world? Does it wish us to mend it, light and dark, green and flesh? Will it be free then? I think the world is a desperate element. It would have us calm it, receive it. Therefore this is what I must ask you to imagine: wind; the moment when the wind drops; and grapes, which are nothing, which break in your hands.