Monday, January 5, 2009

Sestina

"Without protection, you are making love to AIDS. Protect yourself."

After the meal, your wrappered skewer points to the sexual--
Related places--on the rough map of the table. Memory jolts
The level of our glasses unless our legs sit, and stand the personal
A mixing it has come to mean, and a canceling equilibrium.
Sign up for a course in the genre, because we're here leading
The questioning to make way to the fore, and placement of yes


Yes, it will be enough, duly influences too little of the yesses
The chapped flint pieces nothing else will serve, but the sexual.
So that the fire is made universal, I feel it in my skin, the leading
Edge of our technology, I see it in your eyes like having taken a jolt
Of whiskey. Finally whisked into mutual adjustment, capturing equilibrium
Again, we hover off the mark of each other's adaptation of the personal.


Prying off this layer puzzled that we come again, to our personal
Effects: imagining ourselves in them expands into a story of yes,
And I will be found dead with a copy in my pocket if equilibrium
Chances to find me, if nowhere else the unpartitioned sexual

Encounter with all that we sacrificed for it, spilling out of us, if a jolt
Daliesque, we fashion each torso into a chest of drawers as leading

As a stare. Stay in hotels, in creative silence, until whose leading
The race against loss? Life's difficulties are dependably personal
That hungry. Until a French ad campaign finds us badly jolted
Out of that stance, and trapped among hinged legs. But for the yes
On my lips, and sucking the color-drenched dreams of the sexual.
Thinking about particular realities, a big sleep to come, of equilibrium.

Disarticulates the sting (in the wrong direction) of an equilibrium
We read and write by, and beyond the breaking of all things leading
Towards their long-anticipated end, we are claimants of the sexual.
Kisses to your pink parts--before the flush of exposure, personal
Or otherwise. Confinement to any particular locale or station of yes
Yes it's a shame it might come. I am not dismayed by clandestine jolts

Of electricity we loosed into the public arena, which is just another jolt
Felt as the visceral truths, the furtive in-betweens of life-giving equilibrium,
Your hands flex nervously, or in grief? Smoothing all deformities in yes
Yes, a death wish of the species, rather what befalls the vulnerable, leading
Five cardinal points encompassing the whole question of the sexual.
Similarly covered, we slowly recover from our shared view of the personal

It is this yes, yes sometimes humane or sometimes hairy leading
Us onto further shame to make us modest, beautiful, if jolting our equilibrium--
The sexual corrects a personal sense of being recognized as our own.

14 comments:

Σφιγξ said...

A bit of entomology: the scorpion's stinger is backward in the public health advertisement I am referencing.

Σφιγξ said...

http://www.saudicaves.com/mx/tarant/scorpion.jpg

Maybe the stinger does have full range of motion...?

Σφιγξ said...

I am slightly envious of the contributors to McSweeney's Internet Tendency, who manage a fluent sestina without long lines and mid-line punctuation breaks.
This will need revisiting in any case.

I should do a sestina at least once a month (since they seem to need that amount of marinating time in between). The form is a bit like wrapping newsprint saturated in wallpaper paste around a chicken wire armature. I've made a few of those.

Σφιγξ said...

http://www.astrologyhoroscopes.info/free-horo/sagicanc.htm

Σφιγξ said...

Oops. Sagittarius sun, Scorpio ascendant, Cancer moon.

PeterParis said...

This post led me to check about the sestina, its origins, how to make it...! After reading the “rules” I just can’t understand how you are able to make it! I could read: “complex, elaborate, difficult....”.
I also read about “trobar clus” ... and of course the link to “troubadour”. You learn (and unfortunately forget a bit) every day!

Σφιγξ said...

Two sestinas I like:

Paysage Moralise

Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys,
Seeing at end of street the barren mountains,
Round corners coming suddenly on water,
Knowing them shipwrecked who were launched for islands,
We honour founders of these starving cities
Whose honour is the image of our sorrow,

Which cannot see its likeness in their sorrow
That brought them desperate to the brink of valleys;
Dreaming of evening walks through learned cities
They reined their violent horses on the mountains,
Those fields like ships to castaways on islands,
Visions of green to them who craved for water.

They built by rivers and at night the water
Running past windows comforted their sorrow;
Each in his little bed conceived of islands
Where every day was dancing in the valleys
And all the green trees blossomed on teh mountains,
Where love was innocent, being far from cities.

But dawn came back and they were still in cities;
No marvellous creature rose up from the water;
There was still gold and silver in the mountains
But hunger was a more immediate sorrow,
Although to moping villagers in valleys
Some waving pilgrims were describing islands . . .

'The gods,' they promised, 'visit us from islands,
Are stalking, head-up, lovely, through our cities;
Now is the time to leave your wretched valleys
And sail with them across the lime-green water,
Sitting at their white sides, forget your sorrow,
The shadow cast across your lives by mountains.'

So many, doubtful, perished in the mountains,
Climbing up crags to get a view of islands,
So many, fearful, took with them their sorrow
Which stayed them when they reached unhappy cities,
So many, careless, dived and drowned in water,
So many, wretched, would not leave their valleys.

It is our sorrow. Shall it melt? Then water
Would gush, flush, green these mountains and these valleys,
And we rebuild our cities, not dream of islands.

-- W. H. Auden


The Painter
By John Ashbery


Sitting between the sea and the buildings
He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.
But just as children imagine a prayer
Is merely silence, he expected his subject
To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,
Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.


So there was never any paint on his canvas
Until the people who lived in the buildings
Put him to work: “Try using the brush
As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait,
Something less angry and large, and more subject
To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer.”


How could he explain to them his prayer
That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?
He chose his wife for a new subject,
Making her vast, like ruined buildings,
As if, forgetting itself, the portrait
Had expressed itself without a brush.


Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush
In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer:
“My soul, when I paint this next portrait
Let it be you who wrecks the canvas.”
The news spread like wildfire through the buildings:
He had gone back to the sea for his subject.


Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
Too exhausted even to lift his brush,
He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings
To malicious mirth: “We haven’t a prayer
Now, of putting ourselves on canvas,
Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!”


Others declared it a self-portrait.
Finally all indications of a subject
Began to fade, leaving the canvas
Perfectly white. He put down the brush.
At once a howl, that was also a prayer,
Arose from the overcrowded buildings.


They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings;
And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush
As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.

Σφιγξ said...

Two articles I like:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE7DA1E3AF932A35753C1A96F948260&sec=&pagewanted=2

http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1991/spring/schultz-houses-poetry/

Σφιγξ said...

Sestina as scaffolding for thoughts.

Marianne Shapiro's The Hieroglyph of Time: The Petrachan Sestina is on my list.

Σφιγξ said...

http://www.trendhunter.com/slideshow/scandalous-outlandish-safe-sex-ad-campaigns

Σφιγξ said...

Slowly, everything that I have ever thought is emerging, and I sm shocked by my consistency. What do we do, if one is disinclined to broach any subject through the chat window?

Σφιγξ said...

*I am

Σφιγξ said...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9dNpWq9e1Q

Σφιγξ said...

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Selected_Poems_of_James_Merrill/40kpoIwL4bMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=james+merrill+%22flatter%22&pg=PA4&printsec=frontcover