I
You hear a tape where Scott Fitzgerald reads
Keats's Nightingale, plus other verse.
The tape's cut off before the poem ends,
And Scott seems arch and passive, slouching back
In a Morris chair, a smoke in his languid hand.
He must maintain some silence now, or the tape
Must, for that is what the moment needs:
A pause in California, nineteen-forty.
Into this interlude there pours the past
Of East Long Island, just before a plash
Of sound on Sound first fell upon an ear.


II
The ode is badly memorized, as though
Of Lethe Scott had drunk, and Keats's youth
Stands 'paper-thin,' not 'spectre-thin' and 'sun-
Burnt mirth' blurs into 'sun-beam mirth.'
Beauty shades her 'lustrous eyes' and simply
...