• Week 14 • Fibonacci Poems •

I had scheduled Balliol rhymes for this week but was so uninspired by them that I’ve decided to err in favour of a recently discovered poetic form – the Fibonacci.

Anyone who knows me will also know that I am a nut for Fibonacci, Mandelbrot, the Golden Mean and snails in general. I love spirals and mathematical pattens that are in us and on us and surround us. So the question isn’t ‘why shouldn’t there be a poetic form following the Fibonacci sequence’, but ‘why have I not come across this form before now?’

Anyway, enthusiasm (or lack, thereof, when faced with the prospect of the Balliol) became supercharged this afternoon, and I wrote four Fibonacci forms. And here they are, titled as their last line syllable count.

34
how
is
the green
that I see
refracted to you?
Do you smell crimson? Taste the sound,
my onomatopoeia of peppery yellow?
Light that travels straight, follows the line, bends and breaks through glass and water. We are filters,
prisms for sphinxes to hurl themselves against and shout and scatter their cries into seven smooth stones that I must gather before the sun does.

~

21
clock
face
yawns and
opens his
third eye, and the moon’s
propped up on her elbows. Chin long,
she droops toward the horizon, backlighting lichen,
dressing the orchard in ratty lace, igniting the hill while surrounding time darkens.

~

13
my
doubt
fevered
scurries forward
along corridors
to wait in blind corners, behind
tapestries, and in remote moments to ambush me

~

8
he
saw
my face;
he saw; he
fell once and I – oh –
yes. I fell a thousand times more.