I remember the first time I realized
how lacking I was in Negative Capability,
It was on a long slope of lawn
next to a turreted stone building
that housed the shenanigans
of the department of English.

Some brown birds were pecking in the grass,
and yet here I was, a nineteen year old
too concerned with my clothes
and the nervous mystery of girls
to identify with this group of common sparrows
another student was pointing to,
let alone the nightingale we had read about,
invisible in the woods of England.

I was so short on empathy in those days
the only Negative Capability I could have possessed
would be negative Negative Capability,
which I could have turned into a positive
had Keats not so firmly determined
that regular Negative capability was already a positive thing.

All those birds are surely dead by now,
no more hopping around
in the grass of Massachusetts for them,

but I’m still here this afternoon
looking at a dog asleep half under the porch,
an old brown mongrel with a hoary muzzle,
his paws twitching so frantically
I can even see what he is dreaming
as the sun helps itself down the sky.
Yes, I am watching him jump a stone wall
in pursuit of a darting rabbit—
I am way up on a high branch
of a tree that is swaying in the wind of his dream.


 = Karen Marek