Kenwood House

The lip-gloss tastes of heritage London,
its flavor something-berry hedgerow
and the rainy day we took shelter
in the house up on the heath.
Its walls were lined with Jacobeans—
nobody knows who these people were
—the guide says simply.
Long, knowing faces like Donne's
square up with the smudgy day outside.
I want to say tippets and lappets
and words like paduasoy, so marvellous
is the material world of these ghosts.
Their bodies seethe with witty details.
We taste cider, get lost in passages;
the carpet does a bad cover-up job
of all the feet it's taken.
I ask you if we bumped into Donne
or Shakespeare or their wives
(especially their wives
I would want to meet)
could we all make sense?
And you said, of course,
they are early moderns.
Back out on the heath
more fine rain,
more ghosts.
Coleridge warbling
behind his doctor's back
to the nervous apocathery's boy
in the alleyway,
anxious for another draught.