From Stardust We Arose

a narrative poem, a double sestina

This poem today is a story told in 3 parts. As a whole, the poem is a double sestina. That is, the rhymes follow a pattern, rotating with each section, and with double the amount of lines and stanzas. In addition, in each new section, I’ve played with the rhymes, so they aren’t the original words, but sound-alikes.

I say all that, but without the story working out, none of that matters. If the rhythms and sonics don’t work, the rhymes don’t matter. If the characters aren’t interesting (since it’s a narrative poem), the rest doesn’t matter.

So let me know! I’ll see you in the comments.

Photo by Leonardo Menegazzo on Unsplash

---

I. Forwards

1. Cara played strings with stony fingers and frightened away ghosts in shower
fog, wiping away fingerprint etchings on the glass. There was no sting
when she fell, she would sign when they asked, drinking their chamomile tea
and nodding abstractly. She never told them how it hurt, how her peace
was raped and left on a filthy bed to cry every time she couldn't speak. It was fall,
and the leaves were orange and red, colors of a dying sun. Over scotch,
she met a girl with lyrics on her lips and hated her, how the laughs of two
could somehow harmonize more lovely than her cello. Together they ate
cashews on the concrete steps of their apartment building, telling stories
of grown childhoods and felled lovers. "Regret," her mother would say, trying to fix
everything about her, not understanding life is regret and no life is lived, boy
or not, without a little misconception, a little falling, a little failure to decide the right.

2. Gavin, like it or not, was stuck. School held no charm greater than the right
to puke on another man, and so, late one night, he left. At his sister's shower,
he held the door for a bridesmaid-to-be, her arm in a sling and cheekbones no boy
could deny. The curl to her lips beguiled dreams and disguised moods, so that the sting
of her betrayal spiraled him onto the street, where he aged at the speed of another fix.
They shouted "surprise" in voices made of tin. All his family and friends, drinking tea,
eating shortcakes as if it were his birthday. As if that morning, twenty stories
up, he hadn't thought to fly. They exiled him, having denied him the peace
in crushed powders and needles. At rehab, no one else cried, and he ate
as little as he could, his skin a canvas stretched taut across an easel, until the fall
of night and ghastly dreams of pink-faced children with eyes like cats and no two
legs the same length. He'd wake up wet and dehydrated, smelling of too-old scotch.

3. J.J. was an old man by twenty, playing golf with a handicap like a wannabe Scotch
and drinking whiskey on the rocks. His associations were blue and too far to the right
for his father's tastes, he of the steel mill and fingers stained and calloused. By two
o'clock every Tuesday, he met a girl at a café downtown, buried in a shower
of high-rise shadows, and together they unpacked their luggage, took the fall
for each other's minor tragedies and sipped all their worries away. She'd had a boy,
stillborn, she told him. She imagined him growing old in a world where they ate
streusels for supper and swung on rope swings all day, falling into the river, the sting
of death gone. She never mentioned her cancer, showing up in the obits, finding peace, perhaps, in that other world. He left town in a blur, feeling agnostic and looking to fix
a fight with whoever cut him off in traffic or conversation. He buried himself in stories
of other worlds as if he could find her, and tried not to regret spilling his heart over tea.

4. Jocelyn followed men home weeknights, sitting outside their doors until tea
the next day and jotting down their bedtimes, jog times, all times hung with Scotch
tape on her dash and delivered to her boss the next day. Most of their stories
proved to be fables, but she couldn't bring herself to hate them. It was right
after her car died tailing a war veteran with hearing disability and eyes fixed
on a settlement that she had her first pang. Just the one, but by the second week, two,
and before long every man she saw had an honest reason. She let them go in peace.
As a little girl, she'd wanted nothing more than to ride an elephant, feel the shower
of his spray across her cheeks, laugh at his bellows and tromp along, enjoying the sting
of each step as he ran. Now she spent her time ignoring the elephants, refusing to fall
for anyone's words and smiling politely. Lying had become a state of mind, and she ate
her cuticles as she pinned the tail on their donkey. Pleasure Island and another ex-boy.

Photo by Ashutosh Diwan on Unsplash

II. A plot

1. The bay jostled Gavin in his shanty boat, the bells tolling through the night, buoy
playing cop outside his door. A hellish breeze hoboed through, stripping him to tee-
shirt and boxers while the barges planed glacially past, horning distantly. At eight
under an adolescent sun, feeling brackish, he dove in with a pocketknife, scotched
another day on the buoy's back. She was there again, on the pier. He thought if all
she wanted was a fingerprint, why did her posture lie? She could let his sordid history
slope, let it bubble in the gray-green water and die. Instead, she was content tasting
the pink on her lips, running her fingertips across the rough grains, stopping to write
notes in a loop-de-looped pad, lobbing chunks of gravel. He would show her
his broken bones, the jut on his nose, the suture lines up his arms. She would affix
her hips to his loins and make little baby noises, and later he would pick up her pieces,
drip them into the water, float them on the back of the bay until they were gone, too.

2. At the graveside in the early fog, Cara sat on the curb, her dress in a hand and tattoo
in another, thinking the shading too dark in this light. They were singing, a little boy
sound against all that grief, and then she would be gone, underground, where no piece
escapes decay. Her mother's voice, melancholic, grayed like the clouds, the subtlety
of her breath toning what Cara could only scratch. She clawed at her eyes, transfixed
upon wrinkles in the road, and watched her brother usher everyone she could ever hate
into the hearse and ride away, not looking at her. A young man walked by, a shower
of hair raining on his shoulders, bouquet in hand, stopped, looked down at her, scotched
his eyes into her mind. She stood up, walked away, going nowhere, another rite
she learned to conceal her lost voice. He sat on the curb, as if feeling the warmth fallen
from her body, letting it heat him. This fog, she thought, would never lift, lasting
till the end of time when all the dead arise, new bodies, old habits, that great mystery.

3. The air was damp around her. Water condensed at her breath. Clouds tore, re-
turned to earth what belonged to it. J.J. could see that now, see how his impromptu
desire had unseated her insecurities, see how she tried to wash them all away, wasting
what he thought on what he didn’t say. She sat on a gravestone nearby, of a baby boy
and mother. The flowers for the dead he gave to her. Words seemed wrong, as if the fall
of their sounds on a tongue that couldn't make them was somehow sacrilegious. A piece
of their memory, a broken petal, fell. He let it lie, took her home later, made her write
her name, then his. Made her smile, if not laugh. Made her frown, if not cry. Teased
a gap between her lips and made her shine. Her hair smelled of butterscotch
as she pressed her head to his chin. Her skin smelled of fresh linen as her finger fixed
upon his lips. No words tonight, it said. The tongue was a crude ruler, and shall her
voice ever resonate inside him, his must remain cloaked. For now. While it is late.

4. There was a woman on his marker, as if on a stool. Jocelyn let her steps abate,
watched as the woman left, no words said, in the arm of a man, the mystery
of their intrusion carved upon her. She imagined the unborn infant at his shower,
his mother smiling, all the other ladies not seeing her, afar, spying. "¿Y tú? 
A young Latino had held a flier to her window, pressed it. He tatted, crucifix
tilting from his neck against the glass, sprawling. Since their death, she was fasting
from faith, choosing to forget. Across the street, in a park, little girls hopscotched,
potential widows of the little guy underground, locked in the earth, a little boy
forever. They were gone. She approached their grave, no flowers, a cavity
in the stone. Too cheap for love or life. She thought of Gavin on the bay, of all
his contrivances, how he pretended not to see her. His darkness was too bright
to miss. His parents, the woman in the fog, this little plot of grass all podded peas.

Photo by martin bennie on Unsplash

III. Resolutions

1. The park was twilit-hushed as Gavin walked past stone bridges, where a boy pees
and leaves a streak and hobos rest their wares, jangle them for comfort. Fate
was lonely, he surmised, that day he saw Jocelyn, came up behind her, right
as she telescoped, snapping shots like blinking. Young man and woman, no history 
between them, a newness to their silence. He followed her following them, past the fall
of night and the twinkling of the streetlights waking up. The man would show her
a sign in a window, a distant bridge lit up, the black sky scraped where eternity
meets earth, and always dumbly, no words ever spoken with anything but a to-
ward look, a smile. Jocelyn, spied-upon spy, was a shadow now, a smudge, a buoy
bobbing in the smog offshore somewhere past the city haze, imperfectly transfixed
to their bodies like a wavering light, unsure of itself, abashed, drunk on scotch,
maybe, or just dancing with the silhouettes over a nubile moon never-lasting. 

2. Cara often thought the spider in the corner of her bedroom was speaking, testing
her hearing, perhaps, trying to tell her something important, if only she could appease
its black-eyed stare, its docile hunker in its dust-catcher. All her dreams scotched
tattoos on her eyelids lately, of her mother in a spring dress, feet high, swinging upstate
somewhere where snow lies on the hilltops till June. They took their hellos, a suffix
apart, and left, not caring how hot the floor became to her feet, or how the right
to breath tightened. She would pick up the phone, listen to J.J. exhale, imagine a boy
feral and young, sitting in sand up to his thighs, feet burying like crabs, hear a story
in every sea-like sigh, try to glance past his eyelids. Little flashes, stars gone to
earth and dying to her back, ghosts of light at the corners of her eyes, shadows falling
behind her, caught in window glare, never there on turning. It rained, their ubiquity
draining obliquely, her cheeks held to them, blessing the aria singing through showers.

3. The air swarmed on the rooftop, wailing. Jocelyn edged forward, sent a shower
of loose concrete to the ground, past sightless windows where Cara's child lay fisting,
crying sounds her mama couldn't make. The air smelled stale, reeking of the frailty
of hospitals and newborn life. The tiny red infant bent smiles on their faces, peace
through white noise. She dangled a foot over the edge, shook it, let a shoe fall
into the void of night, envied the clatter. Wind played in the private crevices scotched
between her legs, its steel fingers popping flesh. She was a stupid girl, after all, too
boxed up in her own self to see, a virginal creature in a virulent world, second-rate.
The infant would be tucked in a bassinet, no bastard mother with bedtime stories
to smile and never coo, never laugh or sing, never weep. It was too late to fix
now. She would be spasmodic, having drunk what was meant for only carboys,
vomiting in his arms, dry-heaving words, never teaching her child wrong from right.

4. It was midnight of the old year. Showers of fire lit up the sky, carrying the sting
of its death up to the stars. Gavin marked a tee on his chest and prayed for peace,
fought for it. With a nudge she would fall, let gravity come to her, a deed no scotch
could repent for him. Between his two hands, the concrete would eat her like it ate
the city, like it built these stories just for her, to wrinkle her skin as she fell, to fix
the freckles on her face, shape it like a boy's, and let her get her resolutions right.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

---

Your next read awaits: