Sestina Practice (without the correct word pattern)
My mother stops, looks at the statue of stone,
and her eyes squint like when she laughs red.
She married young, in California, to my father
In a church outside a small town of trucks.
And her mother ordered a statue of ice
Shipped, as it seems, on a truck,
Bedded in hay and something like red
clay, though it wasn't important to my father,
Who just wanted to marry her and run to Atlanta.
To the home they will build of brick, ice--
And the mild winters lacking snow and fireplace in stone.
My mother's mother wanted one thing, told father
To button up his pants and sit on a throne of ice
Because he was not yet a king, not yet stone.
He spoke to her in tones hinted in red,
Bleeding words with -ing ends and forevers in Atlanta.
They only stopped when tomorrow rode in on a truck
Sweeping asphalt into the water and stone.
Someone stood up, whispered to my father,
Who ended the tirade with a gunshot of icicles
And the beds of fledgling truckers,
Laid to rest in the bottom of something reddened
By madness and the underground of Atlanta.
My mother's ears glistened darker than blood red
Oranges in the summer, dipped in something trucked
In on a Tuesday, from the underbelly of a Kroger in Atlanta,
A melted, not yet evaporated, puddle of ice.
It's quiet, yelping to be understood and not stoned,
Her desire for the end. After someone, I think, fathered
Another strange occurrence of something with ice,
With my mother's strict diversion from Atlanta
And blushing anger, the crashing of trucks
Into the drunk. It's uncanny, the way someone's stone
Faces the other side of a yesterday filled with my father.
The way an eagle engulfs the nothingness of red.
My father exuded nothing but red that day, he says When I ask
about my mother, the trucks, and my grandmother's ice sculpture.
Tomorrow is yesterday, just covered in stone, curbed in Atlanta.
No comments:
Post a Comment