A sestina

[blp]

The process of addition
Is always direct
There is no cloudburst
Of Fibonacci ferns
Just the simple, sick
Accumulations of a musician

And one day a musician
With his shadow in addition
Took fright and called in sick
Too tremulous to direct
His footsteps towards Fern’s
Sublime orchestral cloudburst

But in his own home a cloudburst
Engulfed the musician
Left the floor a mess, ferns
Scuttered, sullied by addition
Of the wind’s direct
This translucent pool of sick

Or was it music that was sick?
That took fright at a cloudburst?
That quavered with no one to direct
The impulses of each musician?
That built a vomitorium as a home addition
With ramparts of forbidding ferns?

A sudden movement in the ferns
An intimation. Or a cat was sick
The movement swelled with the addition
Of falling drops, the envoys of a cloudburst
In the mind of the musician
With a basic inability to be direct.

‘Of course, what I really want to do is direct’,
He manages, striding out among the ferns
Able to imagine himself, at last, not a musician,
No longer engulfed, no longer sick
A small outburst that quelled the cloudburst
As subtraction nullifies addition

And all addition is multiplication. It is the direct
Progenitor of a cloudburst, the germ of ferns
That live in the guts of every sick musician