EDITOR’S CHOICE: Eight Views of a Lego® Block

EDITOR’S CHOICE AWARD: bringing our favorite previously-published poems back to the front page.

Eight Views of a Lego® Block after Wallace Stevens
Submitted by Peter Frankis

(i)
Among everything moving —
the gulls and the kelp lifting and again
or slumping on the sand in the early heat
Lego® is still.

(ii)
400 billion since Adam –
fecund almost exponential –
36,000 in the time it took to read this:
enough

(iii)
I found one on the beach this morning
battered
matt orange (was fire engine glossy)
abraded by the seabed as it abraded
faded by UV and salt as it imperceptibly
faded.

(iv)
lego is pig-Danish/Latin for put together
yet alone resembles a stone,
once part of the consumer spiral,
now the sedimentary cycle –
sand to stone to sand.

(v)
< 2 grams of
acrylonitrile
butadiene
styrene,
of forests buried, compressed and liquefied in hot rocks, tapped by
money makes the world
catalysed, injected, marketed, lionised.

(vi)
I kept my Lego® in a tin
ardent pipers chased ivory nymphs
round the battered lid.

(vii) – A speculation
(a) Maybe blown
from a young engineer’s imagination
on the SS Oriana’s deck as it steamed through the Heads
while parents at the railing watched the new country
— so clear, so harsh — come into view.
(b) dragged down for an age –
and then yesterday’s storm freed
tossed with weed and fishing line and remains of drink cans where
the dog and I
walked.

(viii)
it’ll take another hundred years,
like a juniper reversed,
slough off a molecule or two
until fully dispersed
into our great plastic sea.

Photo credit: Wassily Kandinsky – Beach Baskets in Holland