There was a lot to notice that morning
in the Church of Saint Dorothy, virgin martyr—

a statue of Mary with a halo of electric lights, 
a faded fading of a saint in flight,
Joseph of Copertino, as it turned out,
and an illustration above a side altar
bearing the title “The Musical Ecstasy of St. Francis.”

But what struck me in a special way
like a pebble striking the forehead
was the realization that the simple design 
running up the interior of the church’s dome

was identical to the design on the ceiling
of the room by the Spanish Steps
where Keats died and where I
had stood with lifted eyes just the day before.

It was nothing more than a row
of squares, each with the carved head
of a white flower on a background of blue,
but all during the priest’s sermon
(which was either about Wedding at Cana
or the miracle of the loaves and fishes
as far as my Italian could tell)
I was staring at the same image
that the author of Hyperion had stared at
from his death bed as he was being devoured by tuberculosis.

It was worth coming to Rome
if only to see what supine Keats was beholding
just before there would be no more Keats,
only Shelley, not yet swallowed by a wave,
and Byron before his Greek fever,
and Wordsworth who outlived Romanticism itself.

And it pays to lift the eyes, I thought outside the church
where a man on a bench was reading a newspaper,
a woman was scolding her child,
and the heavy sky, visible above the narrow streets
of Trastevere, was in the process
of breaking up, showing segments of blue
and the occasional flash of Roman sunlight.