Daniel Defoe, Hosiery Merchant
knew his seams both false & true, his garters, nifty eyelets. A gainful trade,stockings being what they were: always ruined or runneled: even Queen E’s
silk fixed, darned at the tooes. He owned a brickworks, too. Wrote novels.
Pamphlets. One about religion had him pilloried on Fleet Street. Insteadof dead cats, though, people threw flowers & then queued up, elbowing
for the new installment of Crusoe. His patterns more invention than dissent:
purl to shale, quarry to quill; now he’d be checking Apple stock, for a robustcapitalist was Daniel, also a debtor & bigamist, an arriviste who swapped Foe
for Defoe, bet-hedger with a short attention span. I get it. So many threads!
Scarlet, rust-red, poppy. So lush this grass-green fray, so deft that zigzagstitche, a…
