Trevor Joyce

Side by side

FROM A PHANTOM HYPERSESTINA

peacocks
seem out
of place
and uneasy
here

large
rattling
tails
folded

eyes
all
neatly
stacked

like tenses
of some
complex
and irregular
verb tabled
in a grammar

could
should
would

or a hand
of cards

*

stone
human
sky

bedded
three-ply

colour
leaching
levels
down

air glows
diaphanous

sediments
obscure
as human
sentiment
grows
colourable
memory
is heavy
freight

sky
exalts
light

cold sumps
black out

the heart
is a chambered
habitat

*

uh oh
here they
come

they’ll hound
you and pound
you and hammer
you flatter than
pemmican

they’ll process
the meat
of your dreams

reconstitute
soul with
machines

and you’ll never
see anything
brighter than
coal

*

workers
abandoned
work

athletes
left off
striving

the great
relaxed
their tyranny

men of leisure
stopped their
idleness

through corridors
and halls
and offices
state
functionaries
were arrested

and heard
the concrete
roaring

like
accelerated
water

*

always
different
isn’t it?
even though
you sketch
the structure
beforehand

even after all
childhood
spent aloft
or dreaming
outbursts
of limbs

branching
surprises

and always
from the highest
twig
the redbreast
calls you
sweetly
up

These thirty-six word poems are all residues from an unfinished project which attempted to re-imagine the sestina form by taking to an extreme the twin constraints of condensation and repetition. In the event, the work splintered into many of these short poems in which, taken individually, repetition is at a minimum, and the only surviving vestige of the sestina is in the number 36, the total number of lines which constitute its six six-line stanzas.