The Friday Poem on 19/07/2024
In many senses, verse has to do with numbers. Here ‘twenty-seven’ is a magic number divisible by three, and it occurs three times. The precision of those matchsticks, the significance of them falling out of a broken bookcase (one that collapsed under the weight of poetry), and the three-line stanzas with one final line – all of these seem to add up to a puzzle. But this Rubik’s bookcase, placed upside down, reveals something odd about how it was first put together. As he fixes it, the author reflects on the mystery. Out of his reflections, he makes a poem. But where did the poem come from? And why is it compelling? That’s the thing about poetry. You can never quite explain it.
Bookcase
Gravity strengthens where poetry collects on shelves:
the plastic track holding the glass doors has sagged
leaving the doors propped against the wall.
Resurrection. I screw in place a solid beam of wood. But
when I invert the bookcase, the bottom track falls out
scattering twenty-seven matchsticks.
Twenty-seven matchsticks secreted by the previous
assembler. A bodge to cover up a poor job?
The cubed root of twenty-seven is three —
is this a message from a mathematician
or merely an indication that the assembler
had well-smoked lungs? I put the books back
on the shelves. I feel the tug of gravity increase,
begin to drag me down. This force of nature
might suck me in, leaving me reduced
to one quixotic line of verse.
