Torpor Sestina

after Roy Fisher’s Metamorphoses 

Why can’t the fat-tailed dwarf lemur’s hibernation dream be a dream about me? In a burrow scooped from a dry tree-trunk, she mines the fat in her tail and dreams, intermittently, for seven ‘months’ of the ‘year’, digesting more than she eats, like a sprouting seed. 

Such images that bloom in this dream are seeded in her lemur-mind by the same digestive enzymes that energize these fingers that type. We share (‘we all share’) the feeling of a fruit, say, as it burrows through our coiled trunk and onwards to the basin/forest floor/marble mine 

the forest is becoming... But then, is my ‘human life’ even mine in the first place? The dream feels seedy all of a sudden. A great uncertainty quivers the trunk where the lemur is curled torpid. Wearing an acidic expression, she is aroused and creeps from her burrow, intent on digesting 

my question. She cannot speak and at the same time digest, she says, and so we play Minecraft. But a memory overwhelms her of a time from back in her burrow when a palm seed blew in. Joyful at finding the ‘earth’, it threw its shoots around her distinctive lemur snout (referred to by her enemies as a ‘trunk’) 

which felt, she says, like being locked in the trunk of a killer’s Barracuda. I offer lemur a calming Digestive, which she leaves to soak in the memory of the murderous palm while she gets on with some furious tunnelling in Seed-1168863261. She has made a veritable burrow 

in my sofa of velvet the shade of trunk-moss. This burrow, it occurs to me with both horror and admiration, is merely the seed of a future anecdote the marsupial will recount, once she’s digested my ‘human life’, to a sympathetic chunk of marble (the forest is felled) she’ll mistake for a fat-tailed dwarf lemur. 

Caleb Klaces was born in Birmingham, UK. He is the author of the poetry collection Bottled Air (Eyewear, 2013) and the chapbook All Safe All Well (Flarestack Poets, 2011). His first poetry collection, Bottled Air (Eyewear, 2013), won the Melita Hume Prize. In 2012, he won an Eric Gregory award, and was named a Granta ‘New Poet’. He has published two pamphlets: All Safe All Well (Flarestack, 2011) and Modern Version (If a leaf falls, 2017). Caleb’s poetry, fiction, non-fiction and essays appear in journals including Poetry, Granta, The White Review, Poetry London, Conjunctions, The Threepenny Review and The Poetry Review. He is a Lecturer at York St John University.

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