A Sestina for My Students
There is never an empty seat, but still
each student’s head keeps circling the room
as if looking for the lost. Beth and Robin counting
on fingers not just to detect
the lurking menace of fixed meter, but over
the need to reconcile the whole
with the fractious sum of the parts. The small hole
in this class may be anywhere, even still-
born in the way the nostalgia settles over
Avril’s cramped childhood room,
her young father’s death so difficult to detect
no one could notice the counting
down of his blood cells. And for some the recounting
is neither finished nor abandoned. The tiny hole
in Naomi’s cousin’s heart was detected
just a little too late —and still
to this day her poems remember the gray room
where they waited until it was all over.
And for some, everything was over
before it started, counting
on friends that turned out enemies, no room
in the inn for loyalty. Or the black hole
of inspiration that Carolyne always faces in the still
hallway of Sunday night as she eyes a smoke detector
and thinks I can write about a smoke detector!
realizing the weekend is over
and by morning she will have to distill—
from thin air if necessary—a poem that will count.
Peering down the rabbit hole
of his self-inflicted woes, Alan’s eyes get rheumy
and Mike reading his beloved Goethe calls out
for mehr raum, mehr raum—
or something equally hard to detect
in the foreign language no one speaks whole
but in fragments and botched lessons never really over
as Melissa’s confessional approach to accounting
results in a set of cooked books yet again, but still
I detect they mean well. On the whole.
And it’s never over till it’s over anyway, this counting
room of measured hurt, of ghosts that never will sit still.
.
To the State of New Hampshire
(Made of five separate granite ledges that
created a man’s profile, the Old Man of the
Mountain near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire,
suddenly collapsed on May 3, 2003. Later
examination of the stone revealed that it was the
concrete patches and other repairs applied around
a hundred years ago that had actually given way,
though without these repairs the formation would
undoubtedly have crumbled even earlier. Its image
still endures on New Hampshire state highway road
signs.)
The death of stone is never easy. Exposed face
that gives way. The scud of low clouds on lip and cliff,
bloom of ice in the crevasse. Yet, there in the split
between this moment and the next, hangs a whole State,
its sides sloughing off in the mass wastage. We all
tumble down to the sea, and the next dead hiker
feels her foot collapse on the scree above tree-line,
her last words a small prayer to her blank-faced father,
each family with its tense volcanoes, magma
slathering the cracks, then fracturing as it cools,
like the cement used to try and patch the Old Man
of the Mountain, whetting the appetite of frost.
.
Daniel Bourne’s books include The Household Gods, Where No One Spoke the Language, and the forthcoming Talking Back to the Exterminator, which won the 2022 Terry L. Cox Poetry Award from Regal House Publishing. A former contributor to Stone Poetry Quarterly, other poems have appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Guernica, Salmagundi, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Field, Cimarron Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Yale Review, Plume, and others. A translator from Polish, a collection of his translations of Bronisław Maj, The Extinction of the Holy City, will appear in 2024 from Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press. danielbournepoetry.wordpress.com
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 