Is there anyone out there
who can name a movie about a writer
of the eighteenth or nineteenth century
that does not feature a fireplace
into whose manic flames are tossed,
usually one at a time,
the pages of a now lost literary masterpiece?
The scene could be a manor house or a hovel,
fire doesn’t know the difference
any more than it can distinguish a voucher
from a poem that could alter the course of literature.
The culprit is usually a rival,
or the wife, driven mad by neglect,
or a mistress, her damp hair in tendrils,
but the best is the author himself
standing transfixed by the mantel
as he consigns his best work to the blaze.
At least that was the case in the movie I saw tonight
where Coleridge is seen burning
the freshly written pages of “Kubla Khan,”
his drug-sunken face flickering above the fire.
I watched it in our house on a brick street
where the only fire is the pilot light
burning in the kitchen stove.
Where my wife just kissed me good night
and where I’m now sitting up in a chair
like a big squirrel with glasses on his nose
concocting a story about how
I killed my only rival in a duel
on a snowy field one Russian winter
one hundred and thirty-five years ago today.