Poems

Coleridge and the sails

Eleven pages of Coleridge’s notebooks are devoted to the sails on a ship taking him to Malta.

Picture him – go to the alcove of your mind’s eye and wait
        there and maybe he’ll flicker into view.
Not the face, that’s too difficult and anyway it’ll come later,

of its own accord, if it comes at all – no, it’ll be the whole of him,
        the cut and bulk of him in his breeches
and his full sleeves, a long piece of dirty cotton wound like a scarf

around his neck, spilling out over his chest – sitting there
        with his back against a hatch and his notebook
open, resting on his knees. Picture him like that, out on the deck

for God knows how long, hours and hours, just watching the sails,
        how they turn the air and seem to catch the sky’s
breath in their loud taut curves. Look at his eyes, brisk as a lark,

as they dart and skim the ellipsis & semicircles of the bellying shapes,
        moving from ropes to mast to shrouds
...