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A sestina for summer
Mailbox Sestina
- Mailbox Sestina
- So, here’s the edge of summer’s moment, cutting deep
- Into protracted memories like sharpened blades of grass
- You’d again taken for granted, cow-spittle-glazed,
- And cutting open the crickets’ measured elegy—
- Their legworks’ liquid notes evaporate all sound
- As land’s early greening cancels its stamp with tilled brown.
- April rain’s watermark soils with just such a rich brown
- The commemoratives of spring: distant, distinct, deep
- In mind, what mind would pack up in excelsior grass,
- As fragile as ceramic, yet hard and glazed
- As the coulter writing the farmer’s daily elegy.
- (His tractor’s buzzing growl plows through afternoon’s sound
- To perforate its borders.) All totaled, summers sound
- The sigh of sunlit bolts tossed into barn-shadow’s brown.
- Between the light and dark, a country road runs deep
- Beyond the quilted blanket-thought that flesh is grass.
- The practiced route of hours leaves your dusty eyes tear-glazed.
- Your tires eat away at gravel’s hard elegy
- Like a sewing machine’s chattering elegy
- Appalled at its own sound. Time posts summer’s ripe sound
- Until in autumn’s dead-lettered land of grey and brown
- It drags the apple bough down, down… and pierces deep
- The childhood that furs its small feet with shredded chits of grass
- And waits for autumn by a rural mailbox glazed
- With morning hours. For here’s a friendly farewell glazed
- With the come-and-go of solstitial elegy.
- As crickets compose life’s counterintuitive sound—
- Even so, your mind addresses in a study of brown
- The events of June, July, August…. Remember: deep
- As sleep was, new as birth is, lasting as the grass
- Will be, so you go. The sad scent of mown grass,
- Envelops you as you roll the window down, dew-glazed
- As your eyes are shaped to fit the slot of an elegy
- To yesterday. The darkness delivers its sound
- In letters, spurs, flats and sharps—the unlatched dawn is brown
- And yawns with reminiscent light to hint from its deep
- Box the correspondence of time—postscripts in the grass—
- Reversed, glazed with memory’s gum, an elegy
- Delivered without a sound—weighed, stamped, wrapped in brown.
Joseph O'Brien
Joseph O’Brien is the poetry editor for the San Diego Reader.
Here's something you might be interested in.
A sestina for summer
Mailbox Sestina
A sestina for summer
Mailbox Sestina
- Mailbox Sestina
- So, here’s the edge of summer’s moment, cutting deep
- Into protracted memories like sharpened blades of grass
- You’d again taken for granted, cow-spittle-glazed,
- And cutting open the crickets’ measured elegy—
- Their legworks’ liquid notes evaporate all sound
- As land’s early greening cancels its stamp with tilled brown.
- April rain’s watermark soils with just such a rich brown
- The commemoratives of spring: distant, distinct, deep
- In mind, what mind would pack up in excelsior grass,
- As fragile as ceramic, yet hard and glazed
- As the coulter writing the farmer’s daily elegy.
- (His tractor’s buzzing growl plows through afternoon’s sound
- To perforate its borders.) All totaled, summers sound
- The sigh of sunlit bolts tossed into barn-shadow’s brown.
- Between the light and dark, a country road runs deep
- Beyond the quilted blanket-thought that flesh is grass.
- The practiced route of hours leaves your dusty eyes tear-glazed.
- Your tires eat away at gravel’s hard elegy
- Like a sewing machine’s chattering elegy
- Appalled at its own sound. Time posts summer’s ripe sound
- Until in autumn’s dead-lettered land of grey and brown
- It drags the apple bough down, down… and pierces deep
- The childhood that furs its small feet with shredded chits of grass
- And waits for autumn by a rural mailbox glazed
- With morning hours. For here’s a friendly farewell glazed
- With the come-and-go of solstitial elegy.
- As crickets compose life’s counterintuitive sound—
- Even so, your mind addresses in a study of brown
- The events of June, July, August…. Remember: deep
- As sleep was, new as birth is, lasting as the grass
- Will be, so you go. The sad scent of mown grass,
- Envelops you as you roll the window down, dew-glazed
- As your eyes are shaped to fit the slot of an elegy
- To yesterday. The darkness delivers its sound
- In letters, spurs, flats and sharps—the unlatched dawn is brown
- And yawns with reminiscent light to hint from its deep
- Box the correspondence of time—postscripts in the grass—
- Reversed, glazed with memory’s gum, an elegy
- Delivered without a sound—weighed, stamped, wrapped in brown.
Joseph O'Brien
Joseph O’Brien is the poetry editor for the San Diego Reader.
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