(Supposed to be cigarette smoke)
This is a poem, a sestina, that I’ve posted before, but I’m linking it tonight to the liv2write2day blog of Victoria Ceretto-Slotto, in which she asks for poems writtenabout the dark, or shadowed, self. I’ve written a lot of dark poems lately, so could not quite bear a new one, but this poem deals with these issues, at least for its characters.
The sestina is a fairly complex form which uses six six-line stanzas, each line ending one of six repeating words, closing with a three-line “envoie” that uses all six repeating words. (More about the form in yesterday’s post.) It’s a challenging form; the goal is to make the repeated words hypnotic, ironic, thought-provoking, meaningful rather than formulaic or forced.
Hah!
I’ve posted another sestina called “Pink” which is really a better poem then the one below. This one was my first attempt and, although it uses the form, it does so by using fairly generic repeating words. So, it’s a bit of a cheat. (See, I’m already going to dark places!)
The poem tells a story, but keep in mind that it’s a creative work, which, in my case, at least, means it has large elements of fiction, dramatization, exaggeration.
Vacuum
When my aunt came to visit, they talked
of old times, my aunt hunching over
her cigarette, her heavy breasts held up
by an arm across her middle, my mother
smoking as well, her cheeks like a vacuum
cleaner, puffing out. She only smoked when
her sister came, then turned into a teen when
the folks are out. Gestures sullen, she talked
the rebel, as if to fill the vacuum
of her youth, when she never thought she’d get over
all the obstacles they’d set, her own mother
not understanding, no wonder she got fed up.
She loved them, yes, but everything was up
from there–farm life. Especially then, when
owning land was something, not, like her mother
thought, everything. You were still talked
about, looked down on, passed over,
a farm not bringing cash to fill the vacuum
of nice clothes, furniture, rugs to vacuum.
Though what they remembered–that night they stayed up–
was when the government took their land, building over
their farm a munitions plant for the war, and when
their father went north to rawer land, and they talked
of joining him when their own grandmother
was “stronger.” (So they said.) Loved by my mother,
the grandma favored her in turn, filling a vacuum
in the heart of the middle child, the child who talked
of appearances, sticking her nose up
the others thought, the grandma protecting her when
they mocked, but sick now, her life nearly over.
They worked shifts at the plant, then each took over
the grandma’s care–aunt, their mom, my mother.
‘But who was with her,” my aunt asked, eyes round, “when
she died?” My mother thought: “I had out the vacuum,
I remember that. Pulled it out after ringing up
the doctor,” my mother smoking hard now as she talked.
“So it was you,” my aunt said, “when—” “I tried to vacuum
fast.” But slowly my mother spoke, smoke rising up
like traces of what could not be done over, slowly she talked.
P.S. I am also linking this piece to Imperfect Prose for Thursdays. 
ManicDDaily 
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