Kim Russell has challenged us to include two given lines – from Arthur Rimbaud’s early poem ‘Novel’ – into a piece of prose honed to exactly 144 words.

Absent from the Pub for too long lately, I stagger into the bar, ask not for absinthe but for a glass of chalky Cambridge (UK) water to strengthen my bones, and offer a gross of groceries,, with the given lines in Bold Type, comme ça.

Rimbaud unpinned - a proprosery

he was barely adult, though those eyes betray the sighing of signs beyond his little years, of members of that prurient society kept hushed for shame.

in my Evening Dream of him I see the howling to rise: above the tawdry, inconsolable, split-and-spilt. To escape from the portrait into the wider landscape, into the huge perspective of the Tilia perfumed sky. And as we travel out, there you can see a very small patch of dark blue, framed by a little branch.

pinned up by a naughty star, we have this in common, Arthur et moi. We are creatures of the night: owls, spiders or - oui - we are bats, die Fledermausen, des chauves-souris méchantes, laughing the night away on tremulous membranes, themselves stretched across the pentadactyl armoury of bones.

cher Rimbaud, come fly with me across the vastness of the intimate firmament.

© Kathy Labrum McVittie 8 October 2024