What Would John Keats Do? Katy Darby
Do you remember that poem you wrote me, for our anniversary? You’d found a card, retro of course, just the sort of thing I liked – like – you were always good at that. I’d bought a card, and a gift for you, but I was still unsure, then; I didn’t know whether you’d remember, or if you did, whether you’d count from the same night – or if you did that, whether you’d get me anything, so I kept my present for you in my purse, fully prepared to return it, still wrapped, to the back of my underwear drawer if you didn’t mention the anniversary. But you did. My throat thickened as you brought the card out, after dinner at my place, which you cooked in my tiny Fifties kitchenette, both of us knocking back Martinis you’d mixed; me sitting on the only barstool in my black taffeta dress, you in your shirtsleeves still with your tie on. I remember, too, the yawing lurch in my stomach when I saw what you’d written in it: not the word love, that milestone had been passed early on, both ways – no, the poem. It was terrible. Horrible. I mean really, really bad, like a tenth-grader had mixed Coleridge with Byron and yakked up the indigestible parts. It scanned, kind of, and it rhymed – oh Lord, how it rhymed! - but poetry this was not. Mongrel doggerel; horrible, terrible, execrable ... I could barely read it; leastways, not with a straight face.
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