Coleridge in Scotland, Walking

Rain-lashed, shoes in tatters, leg seized by a scorching

he won’t ever escape, he plods on, stumbling through furze

& scree, past potato fields white-flared with blossoms,

the perfect ribboning of countless sheep. O Christ,

it maddens me that I am not a painter. In a week, he’ll blitz

through 200 miles, fueled by stale cake & cheese, thoughts

of his limping, rattletrapped marriage & wide berths from sleep

given the night-shrieks opium churns. If pleasure, he writes,

draws the Soul along like a Flight of Starlings in a Wind,

this is hardly that, although there’s always some fleck of rapture

whenever he’s gripped by cloud or heath, topsy-turvy

mountain silhouettes, birch bark like a rhino rolled in mud,

each leaf he invests with awe. How madly, how purposeless,

the butterfly let loose pushes the air under it, he notes, then tramps

for days through fern-thick scruff, released from the noose

that was Wordsworth & Dorothy yabbering on, fretting

over flea-crammed beds: Would that I never met them!

he scrawls in his notebook when they at last part ways, pausing

from pitching stones at a lichen-splotched stump, for hours

attuned to only that, the same way, 30 years on, still trussed

to his wife & the drug called his strong ale, a few months before

his heart stops, he’ll find himself at a dinner in a claret-haze,

studying friends on a madcap whim flinging crockery against walls,

letting shards rain into his hair until everyone stops to watch him,

plaster-dusted, fork in hand, aiming for a glass perched on a tumbler,

radiating interest, honed to this single task. The thing is, torn

between telling & simply plodding on, I could cram more

into lines about Coleridge striding towards waterfalls

aimless staggering, or, just now, staving off you-name-it

through a rerun of Cops where a man writhes on asphalt, wide-eyed,

cuffed, wonder isn’t a word I’d use, but why hack out a shape

to my run-of-the-mill froth of grief & mistakes which keep me

from standing still? Instead of some riff on loss you’ve heard before,

I’ll say here, through a sea of saying, whatever else I can:

one day’s thermal-winging, dirt-colored hawk, those clattering

surf-drenched stones. Where the path is possible, there I go,

Coleridge once scribbled to the woman he loved, describing

the gamble of hurling himself down rocks & crags in darkness,

not caring what might lie beneath as he bucks his way frenzied

from boulder to boulder, chest puckered with heat-bumps,

into ragged Burnt-Land. Although even as he reads this phrase,

he knows it’s time to thrash on, since already this seems

like inscribing the earth with his own might-have-been

when today all he wants is swaths of this unfamiliar world

unharnessed from regret. Peat-moss squelch, river skittering

with light. Or something like each snaring, bearable thing

he doodles in his notebook, unable to break his now-quickened pace,

even when words, for a moment, fail—glyph of bough-curve,

road-swerve, a hook-like bay, ridge in a helter-skelter plunge.