Coleridge wrote his best poems in a poppyseed haze.

I’m not sure about those tiles, he said from my bathtub,

looking up at the ceiling. I had no idea what he was thinking:

my only experience with opium was the YSL perfume, that

pungent amber stuff that always sat on my mother’s dressing table.

And then later, the redesigned Black Opium, an awful

vanilla-sugar thing I wore to class with a scratch on my wrist,

angled and shallow like a cat might have done it. When I came

home, Coleridge was alight. He showed me the poem

he’d written, wet with tap-drip. I know it is but a Dream,

yet feel more anguish than if it were Truth, he told me.

In my own visions, cross-hatched and foggy though they are,

I can still make out the shape of you.