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The Afterglow 
Certainties—truth, beauty, and belief—
go in and out of focus. Mostly out.
Occasional flickers sheet a sky turned dull,
lit up by little else than recollection.
Life is lived both
according to the memory of the flash
and in the dimness of the aftermath.
The tide goes out; comes in.
The light fades low again.
The raw wound of the crater fills with green.
But ah, the afterglow.
And oh,
the undertow.
Coleridge Back from the Dead
A strong if small survivor
whose muffled utterance
is precious proof that language
outlasts a generation—
not language printed on the page
but spoken face to face.
The poems by which we know him
here fade without a trace.
Diminutive and withered,
his white head shyly bent
to his rusty waistcoat,
he mumbles something without looking up.
It’s hard for the withered messenger
to make his dry mouth work,
harder to understand him.
As one rapt in a crowd
drifting lost in thought
shapes one hoarse word aloud
scarcely aware of it,
Coleridge gets out: “per.”
“Per,” he begins, and stops.
Would the completed word
have been Perseus?
Persephone, perception, perhaps?
Perseus... perhaps.
A ramifying realm,
myth, possibility—
exhaled, then breathed back in.
Per was all I heard.
Tonguing this nub of sound,
I wake into my own
late life, my lexicon.
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