new glasses

Extremely grateful that it's the weekend.

Also, have a new pair of glasses. Some changes since the last pair a couple of years ago, which means the new pair feels a little "off", but I should get used to them soon. I picked them up at lunch from the optician, and had kept quiet about it all morning in the hope that I would walk back into work after lunch and everyone would notice my cool new glasses. Alas, they did not, but they all told me soothingly how nice the new glasses looked when I pointed said new glasses out to them. (Okay, so they aren't really that different from the old pair. But you know how it is.)

---

Keats

When Keats, at last beyond the curtain
of love’s distraction, lay dying in his room
on the Piazza di Spagna, the melody of the Bernini
Fountain “filling him like flowers,”
he held his breath like a coin, looked out
into the moonlight and thought he saw snow.
He did not suppose it was fever or the body’s
weakness turning the mind. He thought, “England!”
and there he was, secretly, for the rest
of his improvidently short life: up to his neck
in sleigh bells and the impossibly English cries
of street vendors, perfect
and affectionate as his soul.
For days the snow and statuary sang him so far
beyond regret that if now you walk rancorless
and alone there, in the piazza, the white shadow
of his last words to Severn, “Don’t be frightened,”
may enter you.

-- Christopher Howell