Sweet and Wild and Sure

From Tom Clark's Junkets on a Sad Planet, his lovely meditation on the life of Keats. Wonderful companion read to Devil Mood's recommendation of Jude Morgan's Passion.

Digressive

I strolled the Heath with gentle Coleridge
that archangel now a little damaged,
greying, shaky, wandering, rolling-eyed,
yet still air-floating, shadow-loving:
we spoke of nightingales, nymphs
who live beneath the ocean, dark,

far metaphysics, stars,
monsters, the kraken, ghost stories,
and how the mind keeps on
going, discharging into wordless
depths of feeling the wreath'd

trellis of a working brain
even when the lights are out,
the eyes closed, and the river
of the dream starts flowing
sweet and wild and sure in language strange