‘CATCH ME SOME radio words, elegant on the page. Lucent. Patina. Cerulean.
Only a vibrissa from the indescribable essence.’
Your to-do list has two topics: the Chinese wheelbarrow, suggesting a
form; and ‘Shenandoah’, shanty of lost love, a thousand miles, oddly, from
the outlet mentioned. A ten-metre scroll of prosperous Suzhou shows not
one wheel, only sedans. A river or an Indian chief? Heartmelt flows down
not the intricate Yangtze, only the mighty Missouri, wide and rolling.
1st – The Apprentice Poet
The academy is bright with next year’s faces. The takeaway point from
workshop number one: ‘A computer spreadsheet is efficient for checking
rhythm through column alignment. Transfer the text to a word processor
for fancier printing when you’re done. (Check your sensory handles first.)’
2nd – The Poet Detained
The modernist project is the shaman’s triumph. That word ‘right’ belongs
to a dangerous type of ambiguity. Tanks roll in with banners flying. The
renegade poet under house arrest is forced to be prolific, in notebooks
couriered every day by motorbike to the Museum of Social Achievement.
3rd – The Street Poet
In the Bairro Alto a lyric may reduce the price of irresistible comfort.
Many a streetwalker surfeited on flesh is happier to get acquainted with
the ghost of a machine pump juddering at full steam. With luck he’ll
improvise on her loveliest particulars; if not, he’ll probably pay more.
4th – The Elemental Poet
Social poets need not apply themselves; career poets ditto. Her roots are
gnarled homunculi, unrecognisable in a line-up; her leaves are sui generis.
A fraying tree is all nerves. Raptors tear across the spirit’s wildness. Flatpackers
flounder: nobody believes the instructions any more.
5th – The Poet and the Printer
A call at 2am. He crawls out of bed in a blizzard of metaphor, scraping
ice off his car, driving on virgin snow. They are old friends who till now
haven’t met. ‘I must insist on the internal rhyme: assonance won’t do!’
They trudge to the chicken yard, then check the beech marten traps.
6th –The Poet’s Début
This Tibetan skull, silver-lined, with obsidian eyes, squats in the
bookshop, presiding over the launch. There’s Thoth himself, signing
backwards without a mirror, a simian on his shoulder. A timid journalist
ventures, ‘Would you call this your mascot, sir, or your totem?’
All six – The Poet in Residence
The rhymes for ‘knit’ are legion; ditto ‘wear’. Her Walsingham is the
Immaculate Village where she browses the carousel of trolley tokens,
none of them embossed with her name: Maya. Her vocational wish list?
Moulin Rouge (Paris), Shard (London), International Space Station.
♦
Introduction to Six-Way Mirror | The Index of Hexagrams and Cantos
