Negative Capability by Michael Quattrone

"Keats said hold your contradictions. Keats died young."

Negative Capability

by Michael Quattrone

When you said, Don’t get the wrong idea about me, 
I got so many ideas. The best of them were wrong.
Keats said hold your contradictions. Keats died young.
Maybe you were my contradictions. Maybe I held you.
Maybe we watched the ideas move in murmuration
over the barn. It was autumn. It was spring. The summer
hay was bailed in the loft. It was green. It was gold,
waiting for a winter match. Keats said yes to everything.
He called one cow Beauty and the other Truth.
You let them out while I found the kerosene and poured.
I promised this would be the last wrong idea. You coughed
up a nightingale. Fuck, I said, Keats is taking over this poem,
we’ve got to burn it down. You said yes. So we made love
in the burning barn, while all the ideas cindered and sang.

First published in Bennington Review, 2025, Issue 14. Reprinted with permission.