Sestinas

THE OBSESSION

Last night I dreamed my father died again,
A decade and a year after he dreamed
Of death himself, pitched forward into night.
His world of waking flickered out and died -
An image on a screen. He is the father
Now of fitful dreams that last and last.

I dreamed again my father died at last.
He stood before me in his flesh again.
I greeted him. I said, "How are you, father?"
But he looked frailer than last time I'd dreamed
We were together, older than when he'd died -
I saw upon his face the look of night.

I dreamed my father died again last night.
He stood before a mirror. He looked his last
Into the glass and kissed it. He saw he'd died.
I put my arms about him once again
To help support him as he fell. I dreamed
I held the final heartburst of my father.

I died again last night: I dreamed my father
Kissed himself in glass, kissed me goodnight
In doing so. But what was it I dreamed
In fact? An injury that seems to last
Without abatement, opening again
And yet again in dream? Who was it died

Again last night? I dreamed my father died,
But it was not he - it was not my father,
Only an image flickering again
Upon the screen of dream out of the night.
How long can this cold image of him last?
Whose is it, his or mine? Who dreams he dreamed?

My father died. Again last night I dreamed
I felt his struggling heart still as he died
Beneath my failing hands. And when at last
He weighed me down, then I laid down my father,
Covered him with silence and with night.
I could not bear it should he come again -

I died again last night, my father dreamed.

NOTA BENE: For other essays and memoirs on this subject, please see elsewhere on this blog “Deep Ancestry,” “The Story of an Italian Protestant,” “A Letter to My Son,” “An Immigrant Ballad,” and “A Paternal Curse.”

Originally published in New CollAge, xiv:1, 1982. First anthlogized in The New Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics, University Press of New England, © 1986 and reprinted in The Book of Forms, Third Edition, University Press of New England, © 2000 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved. It is part of a sequence of poems titled "Letters to the Dead" as of October 2007 (all rights reserved) not yet published as a series.

THE DEAD LETTER OFFICE
A sestina without envoi.

Our Hero has been writing to the dead
Because they have been coming to his room
During his sleep and cumbering his dreams.
They never speak, however, and it seems
That if he hopes to send them back to Doom
He must write missives which must then be read.

But how can he be sure they will be read?
He addresses them c/o Office of the Dead,
Stamps them all and sends them to their doom.
But have they been delivered, or is there room
For a sure and certain doubt? He sighs. It seems
There's nothing for it but to resort to dreams.

He goes to bed and enters into dreams.
He stands before a building made of red
Incendiary brick lost in the seams
Of cobbled streets. Office of the Dead
Is lettered on the door in runes of rheum
And flaking paint, as though the Day of Doom

Had cracked upon these boards. "Is this the doom
Of writing, then?" Our Hero asks, "of dreams?"
For he has forced the door, stands in a room
Hollow as any novel he has read,
Empty as any poem, and as dead.
There are no letters here, or so it seems

At first — but then an envelope that seems
To have been spared for solitary doom
Catches his eye — it is not for the dead;
It is addressed to him. Our Hero dreams
He opens it and reads. What he has read
He understands...but only in that room.

When he awakens in his own bedroom,
He cannot think of what it was he seems
To have understood in the epistle that he read
There in the cobbled streets where he sought the doom
Of letters full of silence, the sound of dreams
Echoing in the Office of the Dead.

This poem was originally published in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Winter, 2003. It is part of a Sequence of poems titled "Letters to the Dead" as of October 2007 (all rights reserved) not yet published as a series.

THE FOREST OF MY SEASONS

Desire today is a cavern of snow;
ice rimes all limbs with synonyms for wind.
Yesternoon it was goat-time, time for horns
rampant on a field vert under the woods
quartered in a southern compass. Toucan
tones rose close beneath the surface of shade,

threatening rupture. Poet, draw your shade
today upon a mirror made of snow
shadowed. Men may hibernate if bears can.
Desire must sleep in a cavern of wind
till it may be harried awake by wood-
pecker beak and Pan's sunsharp or ramshorns -

Too many words, like girdles built of horn,
confined in an attic. How to say shade
but make it mean more, as: tiles of the wood
laid for light to walk on; and to have snow
imply more than God's linoleum. Wind
is wind, but direction matters. Who can

help me? Where's my muse today? Shake your can,
you errant Echo, and get home. My horns
sprout long as the cuckoo's song while you wind
your own clock and make love with your own shade
someplace up a cavern or down the snow
where wild Narcissus buds among your woods.

The forest of my seasons grows strange woods
sometimes; this fall of words grows as it can,
not as it ought. My pen is cold as snow:
its ink runs like chilled honey from the horns
of silence. Lie you down, lie down in shade,
word-warbler. Sleep sound with your mistress wind.

And while you sleep, dream. Dream of the south wind
needling you awake with slivers of woods:
birch and pine, maple that sweetens in shade;
oak on the white hillside. Dream, if you can,
of gray moles, brown mice, winter's hunting horns
blown to silence. Dream no longer of snow,

for time and flesh shall do more than wind can
to blend your words with woodwinds and woodshorns.
There will be tonics. It's time for shades now.

Originally published in The Northwest Review, iv:3, 1961. First collected in Awaken, Bells Falling, University of Missouri Press, © 1968 by Lewis Turco. Included in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale:StarCloudPress.com, copyright © 2007 by Lewis Turco. All rights reserved.

SESTINA IN INDIAN SUMMER
"Everything is good in its season."

After the frost summer returns and settles
Into the orchard. The sluggish yellowjacket
Describes its ovals over the bright windfall,
And the leaves begin to color our landscapes
The russet of oak and the maples' ocher.
This is no time for us to think of winter

And its white song, no time to sing of winter,
Of fires on our hearths, before our settles,
Running along the backlog turning ocher
And crimson. The chestnut falls from its jacket
Into roots; sunlight lies long on our landscapes.
We listen in the night to hear the wind fall

And wonder when it will rise again to fall,
To take the leaves and pile them into winter
Among the stooks that walk across our landscapes.
It is enough for now that the wind settles
Into breeze and the grass removes its jacket
Of frost while the landscapes of maple, oak, or

Chestnut put on their robes of russet, ocher,
Saffron, and settle in to wait for the fall.
Asters and cedars have the yellowjacket
Along the brook, and we will not now inter
Our languid hours where the dragonfly settles
Among the rushes. The warmth of the land escapes

Slowly eastward toward the stony coasts, capes
And bays where the vacant beach wears a choker
Of brown kelp, a necklace of shells that settles
Into the sand. We wait and ignore the fall
Of leaves, the failing summer, and the winter
Impending. We hear the late yellowjacket

Circle, the horsechestnut fall from its jacket
Of thorns; we watch color transform our landscapes,
Knowing that the allcolor of our winter
Is nascent beneath this flowering of ocher.
This renaissance of summer is but windfall.
Soon we will hunker down upon our settles

In sweater and jacket. Backlogs of oak or
Maple will burn; their smoke will stitch our landscapes
To the winter weather that falls and settles.

Originally published in The Southern Review, xxvi:1, January 1990. First collected in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale:StarCloudPress, © 2004 by Lewis Turco. All rights reserved.