standing here in my disaster zone
of a bedroom
reading Coleridge out loud
to the mirror on my wall
I was
packing up novels, anthologies, Bibles
into wine and vodka boxes salvaged from the Co-op liquor store
boxing up academia
as if it were the remains of
a frat party
or
a pretentious hors d'oeuvres-laden meeting of the undergrad minds
my Harbrace, my Nortons, my Gilbert 'n Gubar
are now just the makings of some wicked upper body strength
and an increasingly defeatist attitude toward relocation
my precious findings from the poetry bookshop in Hay-on-Wye
are now just decisions to be made
(can I really not take it with me?)
but this Golden Book of Coleridge that I'm holding is so small
and delicate as a robin's egg
I can't not take it everywhere
(I hear my Kantian self whisper chidingly,
"my dear, this is your duty")
so as I look in the mirror now
I see myself not dimly
but in future tense
laden with tattoos inspired by Ondaatje, family, and the Romantics I count as bedfellows
reading odes to solitude on the Mount of Olives overlooking the Temple Mount
recalling generations of others' forebears-
wanting anything but solitude-
offering up precious sacrifices in hopes of reconciling
with a god who would know them
I see myself recalling Wordsworth on the terrace
overlooking Gai-Hinnom
a terrace mottled with countless gunshot wounds
an everyday monument to the six-day sacrifice
of a breathing ancestry finding its footing again
rebuilding a future from the rubble of history
binding bricks with the bloody mortar of controversy
and I hope I will not have cause to wonder then
whither the visionary gleam has fled
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