A Sestina

I often wonder about rhyme and other formal schemes when it comes to poetry. Why bother? (I ask, assuming the role of punchy internet kid). Why not let the words say what they want to say? 

But I still can't deny that all the poems I feel are my best have been written with a rhyming scheme. They start out free verse, and I chop them into shape, and it helps. I think of myself as a rigorous editor with or without the guiding hand of formalism, but somehow it seems to work its magic for me (when I'm lucky). 

My good friend Ken Armstrong has voiced the theory that by forcing your poetry into a strict metre, you become inventive out of necessity. It's a good theory - better than anything I can come up with - so I pushed it to its logical extreme and wrote a sestina.

(I explain what a sestina is for the benefit of people like me, who had no idea what it was until today - don't be offended if you've been rhyming them off since the age of eight). A sestina is poem of six verses, each with six lines, and a three-line tercet. Each of the six lines in the six verses must end with the same six words, and they must repeat themselves in a strict order. The tercet includes two of the words per line. 

This was, I have to say, a lot of fun to write. Whether it is of any literary merit, well... no. Not really. But fun is good, right?

Sestina

 

Now there is all this distance.

The places where the buildings of your city

rise on the dark coast like teeth

and the sheltered terrain of my home;

the gaps where this rain-battered love

flutters uncertainly toward you.

 

And – 638 kilometres away – you

remain ambivalent to this unchanging distance

and my brief, excited promises of love

yet to happen. Instead you tell me about the city

and the mirrored coffee-table in your hall at home

with legs marked by the dog’s teeth.

 

I dreamt last night of sinking my teeth

in your wrist, and woke up missing you

or believing somehow that you were home,

as if something carried you across the distance

westward, out of your colourless city

while I slept and dreamt of love.

 

You hate these dreams, this expansive-sounding love

or worse, you shrug it off. I feel my teeth

water, and your letters swim in diagonals. You

don’t respond. This weekend I will go to the city

and forget about you until I come home.

I remember when you wished away this distance

 

and how grateful I was for our common enemies: distance

and time, finance and logic; later, probably love.

We wanted to share a kind of home –

I wanted bedclothes, the touch of your teeth,

keys rattling in the door, and you wanted a city

we both knew. I still love you

 

because I don’t know how you feel, because you

are scared of me, maybe. I love this distance

because I know its climate, and this city

because it is a secret you keep from me. I love

without subtlety, your collarbone and teeth

and the places we might have been home.

 

Carefully, I measure the distance between your city

and my home, with a piece of string torn by my teeth.

You would never ask me to love you.