'I see even now
        Young Keats, a flowering laurel on your brow'

Millfield Lane, Hampstead. You shook my hand,
that last time, as Coleridge did just here -
the handshake he said of a dying man,
but today I walked the heath, admired the Turner

and understood the distance I had travelled.
The house is a monument. I went instead
to spend an hour with a slip of a girl
in a damp room, no sheets on the bed

but enough claret inside her to be sure.
Indeed she passed out and I was obliged
to finish by myself. Now I am certain
of nothing but the colour of her eyes.

You praised me, half-proud of, half-amazed
at my posthumous reputation -
...