Sestinas

Evenings, as the sun sank into darkness
and the unfurling Atlantic ocean
tossed foam carelessly upon the sand,
sadly depositing the detritus of life;
entangled seaweed and rotting wood;
I would think of my home in Indiana.

The Costa del Luz is unlike these fields in Indiana
where the corn rattles in the late summer darkness.
The maple and poplar leaves twist in the woods,
mediums for a ghostly wind that hisses across the ocean
taking small scuttling creatures, to which it gave life,
and leaving them, curtly, upon the sand.

Buried within the slowly shifting sand
piled in my parents’ back yard in Indiana,
a small plastic warrior waives his life
in the engulfing darkness.
“I’d like to see, just once, the ocean,”
he thinks, nestled there against rotting wood.

Meanwhile, another small warrior with a scarred red coat
showing a heart of wood
has at least seen the ocean,
has stared out, past the littered sand,
dreaming of a toy box in Indiana.
The gouges and dents of twenty years fade in the darkness
as he contemplates life.

Millions of years ago, these southern hills teemed with life.
Not the coyote or rabbit scouting the woods
for food or prey in the darkness,
but smaller, meaner creatures dreaming of sun and sand,
and of standing erect, and walking through the trees in Indiana,
long after it is to be unblanketed by the ocean.

So now, when I dream, at night, of the ocean,
I hear it telling stories of our life.
And it calls to me here, in Indiana
enticing me out of these woods,
trying to guide me to the deserted sand
where I can see the waves speaking in the darkness.

For now, I walk atop ocean crust, within these domesticated woods
where, eons ago, life beached itself upon the sand
to find its home in Indiana, and in darkness.

[This isn't a sestina, but it started life as one. It, as the title suggests, escaped the form.]

Khaled reads a poem in which there is mention of train tracks.
Later, in the evening air, I will imagine the farm land of the mid-west
furrowed and grizzled,
lying on its back, trying on a new pair of pants designed by spring,
zipped up by the empty rails running off to the distance and fading so
fast they turn into a dream.

The question blooms in the fresh air: Whose dream?
In it, a creature we won’t name has left some incriminating tracks.
We fear it will suddenly spring to a realness as dangerous and
nonchalant as a legend out of the old west.
Before the we can gather the nerve to hunt it down, the alarm rings, snaps us back
and forth between cold coffee and a hot breakfast cooling in the distance.

Outside town, long rows of stubble wait to turn to green haze in the cool morning distance.
surrounded by cold concrete too stubborn to move, we’re ready
to spring for that new car, the vacation out west,
eager to follow the wooden wheeled conestoga tracks left by people
desperately trundling after their dark loamed dreams.
But we don’t.
Some sense of responsibility holds us back.

The farmer, meanwhile is out planting the back forty.
Acres of sterile brown soil fan out into the distance.
He lays down herbicides beside the deserted tracks that once carried
passengers and goods through his father’s dreams.
The sun imperceptibly slinks itself out of the stolid mid-west,
wishing, as it does this time every evening, that it could wake up
tomorrow morning on the beach.

There must be some kind of promise to this season.
The smell of thawed soil on the evening’s breath blowing at our backs
would seem to indicate that it’s safe to dream;
safe, for now, to ignore time waiting at the red light in the distance,
safe to be on the other side of the tracks,
dangerously close to that creature edging out of west.

This is a shakedown;
I’m shaking out everything I know;
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Forget that! Where’s Cummings?
Gone. Dead. Buried – the last good sense
slipped out of a breast pocket on the way to his grave.

Don’t look so grim — the world’s not that grave.
It’s a pleasure dome not yet repossessed or burnt down;
Kubla Khan declared it, with good sense.

And how was he to know
that, feverish and dreaming, Cooleridge
would imagine a river, and a woman awaiting Jack Nicholson?

But Jack’s on the prowl, and Michelle Pfieffer
sits at home while some poor sap gets gnawed into their grave,
some new level of Dante’s Inferno: spending eternity with Poe,

a thin, whispy spirit whose heart is so down,
broken, buried alive by woe, that he can’t possibly know
anything the soul can’t sense.

I don’t have that uncommon sense,
not like Mr. Ed, or Ann Landers.
Hey! How was I to know?

I was sitting on Heisenberg’s grave,
waiting for the other shoe to drop, to fall down
some other reality while I shared a Cuban cigar with Ferlinghetti.

Just then, Dickenson
falls through, and Heisenberg will discover we can sense
what’s going on, but not velocity, nor the direction down

the tubes. What is Asimov’s
spin on all this? Whispering grave
words, he tells us what we can’t know;

That despite evolution, everybody knows
C.K. Williams
was right; that death is a thing born of desire, and the grave

is the last thing that makes any sense.
It’s a small, intimate party, where everyone soars like Michael Jordan,
and is ready to throw down.

It’s not nearly as grave as we’d think, which we’d recognize if we had any sense.
Maybe the only ones who know for sure are Fergus, and Kinnell.
Waiting patiently for us, Lincoln sits on a rail fence, stretching forever, weary and worn down.