"it's desert ice outside but this diner has thawed my ears / hot coffee in a clean white mug"

[larryhammer]

For a Poetry Monday in a September that remains hot (highs still reaching 40°C):


Sestina d'Inverno, Anthony Hecht

Here in this bleak city of Rochester,
where there are twenty-seven words for “snow,”
not all of them polite, the wayward mind
basks in some Yucatan of its own making,
some coppery, sleek lagoon, or cinnamon island
alive with lemon tints and burnished natives,

and O that we were there. But here the natives
of this gray, sunless city of Rochester
have sown whole mines of salt about their land
(bare ruined Carthage that it is) while snow
comes down as if The Flood were in the making.
Yet on that ocean Marvell called the mind

an ark sets forth which is itself the mind,
bound for some pungent green, some shore whose natives
blend coriander, cayenne, mint in making
roasts that would gladden the Earl of Rochester
with sinfulness, and melt a polar snow.
It might be well to remember that an island

was blessed heaven once, more than an island,
the grand, utopian dream of a noble mind.
In that kind climate the mere thought of snow
was but a wedding cake; the youthful natives,
unable to conceive of Rochester,
made love, and were acrobatic in the making.

Dream as we may, there is far more to making
do than some wistful reverie of an island,
especially now when hope lies with the Rochester
Gas and Electric Co., which doesn’t mind
such profitable weather, while the natives
sink, like Pompeians, under a world of snow.

The one thing indisputable here is snow,
the single verity of heaven’s making,
deeply indifferent to the dreams of the natives,
and the torn hoarding-posters of some island.
Under our igloo skies the frozen mind
Holds to one truth: it is grey, and called Rochester.

No island fantasy survives Rochester,
where to the natives destiny is snow
that is neither to our mind nor of our making.


I don't think I could pull off using the name of a city as an end word in a sestina. For foreign context, the city in question is on the south shore of Lake Ontario, and northern winds pick up lake moisture and then dump it on the city as snow. all. winter. long.

---L.

Subject quote from "Homecoming (Walter's Song)," Vienna Teng.

Comments

[shewhomust]

THat's very impressive - and a completely new name to me!

[larryhammer]

Hecht is one of the three American poets of his generation (those who came of age during WWII) I most admire. He was not as prolific as some, a total of six collections over fifty years, but uniformly high quality and strong punch. A good starter poem is "The Dover Bitch".

[shewhomust]

That, too, is clever, but I like it less. It feels a little too pleased with itself - or is that a voice deliberately assumed?

[larryhammer]

Good question -- it can be hard to tell with a writer, like Hecht, who spends a lot of time writing in personas. Have to think on it to decide which I think.

[asakiyume]

I do love me a sestina! And this is an excellent one--thank you!

[larryhammer]

It is, indeed, an excellent example of what the form can do. Hecht is that kind of good.

[thistleingrey]

Wow. Most sestinas wow me, TBH, but wow, the weavings-in of place.

[larryhammer]

Yeah.