Most poems hand you something finished. Mary F. C. Pratt's "Open Studio Poem #6" hands you a job. Four times it gives the same command, "Name something...", and four times it leaves the answer blank. The title, with its number and the word "studio," suggests one of a series of exercises, but the text alone tells us nothing more, and it needs nothing more. What matters is what it asks of the reader: stop filing the world neatly under hearing, taste, smell and touch, and let the categories leak into each other.
The construction is more careful than it first looks. Each request has two halves. The first line names a quality tied to a sense: "audible," "edible," "fragile," "fragrant." The second line then gives a comparison. The opening request sets a gentle ground rule: something *audible* that *sounds* like a pineapple. The sense matches, and only the object is strange, since a pineapple is spiky and sweet and not obviously a noise. After that the poem stops being polite. Something edible "smells like a floor," something fragile "tastes like an apple tree," something fragrant "feels like a door." Now the adjective belongs to one sense and the verb to another, so the reader has to build a bridge between them. Sight is missing from both columns, which suggests, though the poem never says so, that the eyes have been switched off on purpose.
The sound of the language does quiet work too. "Audible" and "edible" are near-rhymes, and "fragile" and "fragrant" share their opening sounds, so each pair of prompts feels like a matched set. The only true rhyme is "floor" and "door," which close the two halves of the poem. Because nothing else rhymes, the pairing lands like a latch clicking shut, and a door is a fitting thing to end on. The line lengths help. The poem alternates between a longer line and a shorter one, and the endings get blunter as it goes. "Pineapple" and "audible" are long, slippery words, while "floor," "tree" and "door" are single heavy beats. With no commas and only occasional full stops, the repeated pattern has the rhythm of a game or a chant, as if someone were going round a circle asking questions.
The objects themselves are well chosen. The poem moves from fruit to floor to tree to door, alternating between the natural world and the rooms we live in. Then there is the echo of "pineapple" in "apple tree," which stitches the first half to the second. Judging by the imagery, there may even be a hidden link: floors and doors are usually made of wood, and an apple tree is where wood begins. Whether Pratt intended that or not, the poem rewards the kind of noticing it asks for.
The central idea is that metaphor is something you do rather than something you receive. Nobody is told what smells like a floor. You have to go looking, perhaps for the warm, dusty sweetness of a loaf of bread or the polish on old boards, and by choosing an answer you decide what the phrase means. The poem is half a poem until you answer, and that is what makes it significant. It turns the reader into a co-author and shows, in only eight short lines, how poetry works: by putting two unlike things side by side and trusting you to find what they share. It also treats that effort as play. The questions have no wrong answers, only more or less surprising ones.
That is a generous way to teach something. Instead of explaining what a metaphor is, the poem sets one up and steps back. By the time you reach "door," you have probably started composing your own replies, which means the poem has done what it set out to do.