BlogHer is having a poetry contest, and so at quiet time today I wrote a sestina. Beyond being a lovely word on its own, a sestina is a kind of strict but also not terribly structured form of poetry.

The sestina follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi. The lines may be of any length, though in its initial incarnation, the sestina followed a syllabic restriction. The form is as follows, where each numeral indicates the stanza position and the letters represent end-words:

1. ABCDEF
2. FAEBDC
3. CFDABE
4. ECBFAD
5. DEACFB
6. BDFECA
7. (envoi) ECA or ACE

(Poets.org)

I have a hard time keeping the end words straight through all six stanzas (and the envoi!), so I used this handy-dandy Sestina-O-Matic template generator to help me. You give it your six words, and it churns out something that looks a lot like this, except with your own words and more lines:

# Use the template below to create a sestina.
# Your job: replace the ‘…’ with poetic greatness!
# Each line should end with the word shown below. …

# Stanza 1
… popsicle
… turkey
… peppermint
… abrigado
… munificence
… elk

# Stanza 2
… elk
… popsicle
… munificence
… turkey
… abrigado
… peppermint

and so on, etc.

Anyway, I sat on the couch and wrote this. It is, of course, mostly about the cats and also my socks. I haven’t written a poem in a lot of years. Be gentle.

Yesterday and Today and Tomorrow

Every soft surface trumpets it: “Here be cats.”
White fur everywhere bringing to bear
my best efforts to eliminate that ruff silhouette.
They’re alert at the window for every fly-by bird,
and in the floor my bunched-up socks
transmorgify now to toys. Like ducks to water.

Every morning I fill two little dishes with water.
Who was it that said that about the fog and the cats’
feet never met my cats. Those little fur socks
are stiff and strong and hard to bear,
digging and kneading bones hollow as birds’,
soft swift paws sharp as a silhouette.

On the mantel: A pair of silhouettes;
Five vases and not a drop of water;
one white ceramic discount bird;
knick-knacks that could pass for cats’
toys; and a single forge-fired black bear.
It’s maybe the only place I don’t leave my socks.

That habit of leaving my socks
everywhere bothers him. His silhouette
steels but I know he’ll silently bear
witness to my carelessness. And he’ll water
the plants and me and the kids and the cats
and never complain. He always has been a good bird.

The front yard will be covered with birds.
I tried to save his hat and now my socks
are sodden. The kids and the cats
are in the basement, their silhouettes
dark against the fluorescents. I’m water-
logged again and it’s almost, almost more than I can bear.

Last fall there was a small black bear
wandering our neighborhood. He was burred,
I’d imagine, half-starved and looking for water.
My feet can hardly stand the stricture, those socks,
and day by day my sofa-softened silhouette
repulses some but seems to entice the cats.

It’s genetic, I think, this preference for bare feet over socks.
A bird floats on the wind, paints across the grass his silhouette
and no longer yowling for water they become truly feral cats.