The writer in ink has faded
bone white parchment skinned
That shade embalmed in words
rolled on a thousand tongues and more
like the aftermath of a feast
still tasted and
yet broken by the man from Porlock*
And the uninvited still arrive
to pry and listen at your door
but the wood only whispers of rot
and the midnight frost.
in rooms that resound
with a child's soothing, unwilling vows,
coal fire spit, oration with opium.
We came, my poetry lover and I
proof reading dust
deciphering your mortal frame
I look to the gifts, the ones you left
no matter the man, see in poetry
that abstruse musings are respite;
this world absorbed in all your works
is more a thing of Heaven than when
distinct by one dim shade
suffused
whose very murmur does of it partake
Tis the ceaseless, the thousandfold Echo
Each with a different tone, compleat or in musical fragments
Ye who have eyes to detect, and gall to chastise the imperfect,
Have you the heart, too, that loves, feels and rewards the compleat?
Yet gaze again, and with a steady gaze
- a “person on business from Porlock” was an unwelcome visitor to S. T. Coleridge during his composition of the poem Kubla Khan in 1797. Thus he subtitled it as: Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment
- his house at Nether Stowey in Somerset is a National Trust tourist venue
- reference to one of C’s poems: Frost at Midnight
For my MTB prompt: “Elaborating Lacunae in the Fragment or Keeping Things Whole” we are selecting a 13 line or less fragment (of) poetry and expanding/completing it, as in this conversational collaged poem, with italicised extracts of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Fragments #5 & #6
PoetryPix 