A COMPANION PRIMER TO
Six Descending Notes
by
Karl J. Sherlock
SOME SUNDAY
a variant sestina with phonemic
slants
|
stanza
1 |
abcdef |
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stanza
2 |
efabcd |
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stanza
3 |
cdefab |
|
stanza
4 |
fabcde |
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stanza
5 |
defabc |
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stanza
6 |
bcdefa |
|
envoy |
fe,
db, ca |
Before sleep, and testing the worrisome gas pilots, you saw a spirit
smudging the full moon's face, and begged not to let those clouds abridge
that moment, not to blot out your mother's image. But they did. And in
you, a lamp
might have burned its fuel: no last chance to reach up and take hold
of that white, reproachful look. What else could have matched it:
the face in the open casket, the wisps of white hair, tatted lace
filigreed about the neck? High over the patio's trellis
loomed your mother's ghost. Then, in the sky's great bog, her spirit
submerged into its filaments. And you slunk back into your average
house, and saw things perhaps the way they really were: no lamp
quite as bright as that moon now; where there was once a husband to hold,
nowadays the portly Pomeranian coiled about your feet at night; the matching
laminate provincial dressers and the lumbering armoire that didn't quite
match,
the one he called "the confessional"-how droll-and the
curtains laced
back against the window to let the moon paint the patterned spirits
across the quilt. In this room, you slept; he, in another. And what was Bridge
Street this far from her stony grave, now ambled over by the bored Irish
lambs
amid the drizzly pasture? What remains were there of a marriage, whole
at first, then slowly given over to the dull disintegration when the hole
between the giddy, girlish past and the sober, ancient present, widens
and matches,
the mood of that first, sullen, drag-out fight some thirty years ago. If
he lays
another hand on you, you'll end it there, take heed. It won't be the spirit-
broken mother who bundled up her youngest, and cried with him on the
foot bridge
of Grant Park until frost bit through grizzled afternoon and the lamp
posts frowned over the wrack of leaves below. Thinking how you lampered
home then, my mother, what amazement to watch you, years later, hold
my arm one dark Sunday night, dash from the Dunns' cottage-matchless
and sure-footed through the treacherous bog and boots laced
tighter, as though they were keeping both our nerves secure-and spearhead
the trek back to your father's cottage. How did you bridge it,
cross that fear in the years before you died? When did you take umbrage,
at last, with the moon and its misery? With a husband's bedroom lamp
out by eleven, and the quiet remainder of a Sunday night to hold
your hand into the dull, forthcoming week? I see you now among images
of a different sort: gazing down, lucid and cool, upon the empty place
where you used to live. I see you before that confessional in higher spirits,
your ghost blustering the lace curtains, and clutching three matches:
one to hold beneath the guilty house;
one, to bring down the foot bridge; and
one to blaze the lamp which, through
the long night, I know, will spirit you.
CHURCH AND STATE
a traditional sestina
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stanza
1 |
abcdef |
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stanza
2 |
faebdc |
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stanza
3 |
cfdabe |
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stanza
4 |
ecbfad |
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stanza
5 |
deacfb |
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stanza
6 |
bdfeca |
|
envoy |
df,
ec, ba |
Converting church to polling station seems a breech of faith:
in place of font and tabernacle, here, a ballot box;
and where, against these walls, the pooling candles should have cast
their soulful flickers, now with room to romp, a lawless child
deals his mother glancing blows. Even the minister keeps
a layman's spellbound gaze fixed upon the desperate measures
she must take to bring the boy to heel. We're all the measure
of a parent's worth, but hardly does it hearten faith
in political institutions or the moral charge wherein we keeps
our trust, to see her act with pride in civic duty, and then box
her son about the ears. I begin to wonder, whose brainchild
was this, to strip a sanctuary bare, enlist this stoic cast
and crew from the church's congregation diligent to cast
upon my civic duty such a pious feel? But then, these measures,
props, seats and senators-so often they're just child's
play for church and state. And votes, just prayers: for shaken faith
of migrant farmers kneeling at those dirty crates which box
our grapes and melons; for communion of the rich who keeps
a city's dreams protected for themselves; or for the upkeep
of the cross on public lands. What to do with indigents, cast
from park to depots? Gay men crucified on fences? A box
of simple ballots saves or damns the souls of many; measures
morals in reduction of the taxes; imbues the poor with faith
in economics or casinos; or, with the stubbornness of a child,
miraculously changes the canyons into acreage. As a child
I prayed to flags and banners hung behind a priest who'd keep
the votive candles burning at all hours, and administer his faith
in contributions tithed, in scraps of soap and aspirin, outcast
tee-shirts bundled for Biafran children; he'd countermeasure
Father Groppi marching viaducts beside Negroes, yet our box,
chiseled finally off the vestibule wall, never once was filled. One box
these pulpit politics, especially when told to see as a child
sees the world and multiply the hymnal numbers to measure
out the mystery of life. But, safe at home by order of the curfew, I'd keep
my scapular and missal boxed, then listen to the soul's downcast
sermon of the things that fill our prisons and our pews: blind faith
in every promise sworn before a child; the
great and measured
guards and gods who keep our hopeless
company; and the ballot, cast
into its cardboard box, then winnowed with a
little faith.
a variant sestina with end-word slants
|
stanza
1 |
abcdef |
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stanza
2 |
dabefc |
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stanza
3 |
edafcb |
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stanza
4 |
fedcba |
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stanza
5 |
cfebad |
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stanza
6 |
bcfade |
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envoy |
ba,
cd, fe |
A pushcart in a suburb, a rag-and-bone chant, a brow of olives:
It was beyond me how a tinker found himself among these houses.
How many boulevards of new cement and mid-summer gasps
before a glass of tap water and a fistful of dull knives
ever changed hands? Desperate to charm us, he had tied ribbons
to his axles and sweat-stained jacket. And still, to keep him off her beds
of statice and marigolds, a neighbor nudged a sprinkler, made its knives
of water arc across his path. Surely he must have wondered how she lives
within: who cooks in the cool, darkened kitchens of bungalow houses?
Aprons, unsullied and starched, are folded into linens drawers, ribbons
instead of straps. Gleaming copper kettles are made cachepots to bed
the odd bromeliad; no blades to whet, nor tines to temper; no gaps
inside leaky pots, to dam up. Walkways spool between cedar ribbands
to doorsteps. The closely cropped blades of timothy, like stumpy knives
broken at the forte; curbstones and gutters, rilled with tiny leaves
brooking the sod's run-off into sewer grates that, block after block, embed
his wheels, make him set the cart to rights, so that the neighborhood's gasp
ushers him onward, to terminus: a road piebald with potholes and houses
whose porches are shucked of whitewash; driveways, mere beds
of crabgrass and gravel. Here, the poorer folk admired his ribbons:
a son, urged forth with an enameled cup of orangeade and, yes, the knives
to sharpen. But beyond this point, only what we called "country,"
some gasps
of settlement: cedar waxwing; ambling worker bees; what was a tree-house
once; jack rabbits threshing clotted fields of burdock, where none of us dare live,
and where, broken by his toil, he turned back. Years after, canyons gasp
between cactus and the honeycomb of housing tracts, and now the bad
portent of our progress flanks my freeways, amending roadmaps with ribbon-
cutting ceremonies; I grind the car's gears to work, and spackled houses,
mouldering the valley with chalky roofs, assure me of what will outlive
siskins or scorpions in a scuttle of coastal sage. Once an architect knives
to raze their scrubby hillside, she will edge forth this margin of houses,
force the folds of land to bow down until the desert's breath gasps
out and out. It wounds me, but who else will lie down on this bed
of neglect: I know I travel the graded country, fated to relive
this engineered loss of self-a foot upon the pedal; a wrist against the knife's
keen point of little duties to eke out a life amid lost jobs; the blue ribbon
prize of steady work to ferry me past these ugly houses,
strewn ditches. "I'll live,"
I say-yes, but the cars gasp across
overpasses, and trailers jackknife
until the mesas and all my lost, sweet riverbeds
of dust, are torn to ribbons.
WAKING THE ANGEL
a traditional sestina with end-word
and phonemic slants
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stanza
1 |
abcdef |
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stanza
2 |
faebdc |
|
stanza
3 |
cfdabe |
|
stanza
4 |
ecbfad |
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stanza
5 |
deacfb |
|
stanza
6 |
bdfeca |
|
envoy |
df,
ec, ba |
One jolt, and he's upright, near wakeful, and lurching from that same dream
of parrots flaming over the cold moraines, finials of canopy, and vales
of other-worldly sadness. Seconds expire when he and this vision alone
are all that exist. Then the fiction darkens, only a far-off car alarm left
to ponder. Sometimes, to calm him, I'll sit up as well, my arm like a wing
brooding across his shoulders, then tell him where he is, ask him if he's sick.
This, we know, is a relative term (some hours more fickle with pain). The last six
empty months we have grieved, even in our sleep, to fix this damaged dream.
She has died, Pionus senilis, after
a lengthy, staggering illness, owing
to systemic aspergillosis. This quietly ravaged her lungs with a veil
of fungus, which burgeoned until every other organ withered-inevitable if left
undiagnosed for as long as that. And how antiseptic, to think along
such lines; to disinfect the qualities and charms that rendered her a lone
four-year-old, and gave that wasted bit of life some meaning. No forensic
dispassion could ever undo those mornings when, seeds in tote, before we'd lift
the threadbare blankets covering our angel, we'd hear her through their dreamy
artificial dusk, querying our presence with a few syllables of greeting, veiled
and garbled; once freed, she would climb up, ill-tempered, stretch the pinioned
wing
which could sanguine both ceiling and shirt with its blood feathers; and next,
swing
forward, befuddled, to be lifted up, kissed, walked, then settled again into a
cyclone
of seed husks and nutshells. But like a child who thinks on life's brevity, fails
to grasp it, then one day, does, and finds it in her breath, she slipped into
the sick
repose of the dying. And he, too, very near death then, sobbed into fever dreams,
vomited foam, and soaked the terry towels with sweat, while, wheezing to his left,
in her corner: a needled breastbone and lump of feathers patchy from surgeries
that left
wine-stains of iodine, stitched with scabs she'd pluck from the downy under-wing;
her eye leering below a waxy lid as he fumbled with his urinal. And this pipe dream-
that she'd preen again her gory plumage, that he'd soon quit his tumult-I left alone.
This, the doomed condition: that she must choose to live awhile longer, for his
sake,
if only that he would heal enough to see her yield. And to this secret end I availed
new routines: squeezing out cold flannels, rushing ice-packs when his nausea
prevailed;
swelling her improvised tent sibilant with oxygen; swabbing out his pale, left
putrefied with the aspic of his stomach; urging from her the droplets of fungal
sick
that sputtered through her ceres to my cheek when I flapped her exhausted wings.
Until, one day, he arose well enough, and she, at dawn, cradled her cap into
the loom
of my hand, and finished it. How, then, to seek out grace but in the breach of
his dream
where he may swag his hand into the cleft,
then fold down again, homesick
for her stunted wing? Each of his gasps
alighting my neck must be a lone
shiver of failed flight; each, her veiled
flutter, breathing into our separate dreams.
THE MARRYING KIND
a variant sestina with end-word
slants and a traditional envoy
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stanza
1 |
abcdef |
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stanza
2 |
dafebc |
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stanza
3 |
bedcfa |
|
stanza
4 |
ecafdb |
|
stanza
5 |
fdbace |
|
stanza
6 |
cfebad |
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envoy |
df,
ec, ba |
He's danced the poor woman for hours, without break,
and the bride's mother has simply had enough: a discreet
signal to the polka band ends it. His breathless guest
finishes her gimlet while clarinets dismantle into silver
stumps and plush. Then, the entire party is flushed
out: keys in kidskin gloves; frostbitten cars blocked
by the stalled Cadillac, nylons shivering below the silvern
slab portico of the banquet hall. A taxi's parking brake
ratchets into place as a drunken uncle spasms the block
with a tailpipe's clangor. Finally, the hall attendant, flushed
and congestive, pulls along a push-broom, consecrates
the ballroom floor with it, locks up the place in disgust.
Once newlyweds embark on honeymoon, love decreed
hours ago by church and law, heralded as plumb and flush,
what then but the peevish dregs of a party? When silver
jubilee is next for revelry? When skeptic friends, aghast
at the luck of the married sometimes, ally into a bloc
of gossips dogged about celebrating others' breakups?
To hell with that. We'd wed
alfresco, full of lush,
shameless witness: Kasia in simple crepe, her august
groom in tweed, plighting troth before the breakers
of Long Island Sound, the staging drilled and blocked
atop a shoreline hillock of granite, open air on salver,
chalice, cruet and candles, like millionaires in Crete;
or, my sister Karen's old Tibetan vows, her towerblock
of spouse in lotus wreath and robes; sun and silvan
canopy across the grass; the smoldering of concrete
pit in which they purged their vices, made their breaks
with the past, and leeward watched the rising gusts
skim with smoke. You and I'd rebuff the camouflage
found in pews, temples, and bridesmaids. Skip the bogus
bluster of pipe organs, and antique Battenberg lace blocked
into that swollen bustle of a wedding dress. No foolish
fusillade of rice here. Matrimony makes just one creed:
love's rarity, permitted to be frank, may flaunt or break
tradition. Why, then, dear man, are we barred from silver
chalice, shared sliver of cake, or open
pledge of kiss? Blocked
from standing flush and proud before
parsons, who plague us
to vow a life less indiscreet, and a death
to consummate the heartbreak?
ASHAMED
a traditional sestina with end-word
and phonemic slants
|
stanza
1 |
abcdef |
|
stanza
2 |
faebdc |
|
stanza
3 |
cfdabe |
|
stanza
4 |
ecbfad |
|
stanza
5 |
deacfb |
|
stanza
6 |
bdfeca |
|
envoy |
df,
ec, ba |
He's a twilight ghost, nearly a pattern against the gentle
shadows that nettle the freeway off-ramp. And I would hardly tender
a lengthy stare in his direction, fearful that our looks should cross.
But now, his sloppy form inclines against the dusky hollyhock,
and from the darkness, branching out before him: a lancet
of skin that, with the murky elegance of a mourning dove trained
upon preening a feather's shaft, he is stroking. That languid train
which cargoed my father to Archangel halted once, near a gentle
stand of pines. And the luckless young woman who should glance it
to avoid a mired hole in the train floor where others tended
to their bowels unashamed, she ambled off and was hawked
by a Russian guard who, with his bullet, followed her across
the field, left her a squalid heap in snow. Does this tragedy cross
my thoughts now because, in unabashed moments, I feel trained
to bear another's yoke of shame? My own innocence, so cheaply hawked?
Can the amorality of pleasures, groans and effluence seem genteel,
ever? I've tried hard enough to own up to my worst moments, tender
though they be to prod and break open with the clumsy lancet
of my conscience. In
a first-class couchette across untilled land set
with plundered
bricks, I lurched from a wet dream into a puzzled stare across
a train's
compartment, where a stranger's marvel grew tender
at my arousal-simply hapless, and no worse. But when the train
huddled into a
station, where, at a border guard's behest, I gently
edged off my
winter boot and fileted from my calf, like butcher's hocks,
a souvenir of
currency worth months of wages earned ad hoc
and flaunted now
to cheapen up this soldier's life . . .
Oh god, this, a lancet
of shame to me much sharper than sex's peccadilloes. And what of any gentle
thought to sex, even in the father who must bathe his palsied daughter's cross
of genitals, look upon them with that selfsame disgust for nostril, anus, train
himself to squelch all pity for what might be her own desire, simply tend her
and leave it be? Better to pass the sponge headlong. And when the tender
temple of my lover asks for touch, inviolate though this seems, will I hock
an honest act of love, for public's sake? Easy to say "never." Into
gloomy terrain
of duty to a private list of sins, though, we addle, lose our nerve, glance at
rigid, disapproving faces for our signal, that we may shoulder forth their ugly
cross.
Best to let the dusk, then, flourish with indifference on the man who is tangental
even to the traffic. Who won't pretend or
balk from guilt, since what supplants it
yaws like a tomahawk pitched into the
darkening, hostile path, and crosses
our distance, constrained to know me, as his
foe, or as unashamed, and gentle.
SIX NOTES
a proportionately written coda of six
sestina envoys and a free-verse conclusion
|
envoy
1 |
"Waking
the Angel": df, ec, ba |
|
envoy
2 |
"Ashamed":
df, ec, ba |
|
envoy
3 |
"The
Marrying Kind": df, ec, ba |
|
envoy
4 |
"Tinker's
Damn": ba, cd, fe |
|
envoy
5 |
"Church
and State": df, ec, ba |
|
envoy
6 |
"Some
Sunday": fe, db, ca |
|
conclusion |
- |
This basement is a tundra: handtools hung aloft the cool and basic
crust of grey floor; larval wingnuts,
sheet metal conduits; a lone
white commode sweating; veils
of dust, a borealis twilight, rare, dreamy.
He's but a boy, tender
yet, so leave him in this lassitude, to glance at
canning jars arranged ad hoc
on shelves; crutches in the cedar crisscross
beams; in splitting cartons, model trains.
Upstairs, nothing is so gentle.
Though here the centipedes and silverfish
insinuate the cinder blocks,
subpump capstone flushing
rotting vines and roots, and radon gas
sighing through the poured concrete,
the kitchen is where ice-floats break.
Glaciers ooze through the house's
hallways. Far below the leaves
and frosty loam, he'll take a final gasp,
then burrow into naive
sleep, beds of chilly
sinew and insensible mud ribbons.
Then with his tin harmonica, in childish
wheezing in and out, he'll measure
six descending notes: the colicky
peep of an alpine bittern; a horsefly cast
across the mica of the freezing bogs;
bashful caribou lowing faith
in musk and molt; a shoelace
fern dripping into icemelt; a damp match's
spitting peal to light a campfire; the groaning whole of an ice bridge
sheered and plunging arctic lampreys
deeper. Wait. . . . Spirits
on the creaking staircase, livid, stalking. Be invisible and still:
a snowshoe hare, a harmony in snow.
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