Coleridge Was a Libra Too

by Sharon Thesen

And liked to write about his household sealed up at night while icicles
descended to the window–ledges and the moon shone o’er snowy
fields and the baby slept in dreamless realms

And he, alienated and alone
with the detritus of his mind and dreary desperation
tamped down with the opium in his pipe

Having talked himself hoarse at the dinner table
not less than a week ago, about the tenor of the times
the politics the over–reaching of the arts the lack of

balance, of some sort of accommodation
to sanity and justice even if the person or character doing something

wasn’t quite aware of what it was, but we were,
we who watched. Things happen so quickly, so
under the radar that only a bat could pick it up

or human intuition, human knowing. We cannot
be fooled, Coleridge knew, without agreeing to.
That fact he called “the willing suspension of disbelief.”

In the smoky environs of his own opioid exhalations
Coleridge observed the icicles’ descent, the waning fire,
the page laid bare upon the table.