Sestina for My Father
01.03.17
Sestina for My Father
The once green yard is littered with squirrels
whose only crime was a taste for bright green walnuts,
now littering the floor of the house behind locks
jammed with scraps of metal broken off by my father.
Every day he barricades himself inside the scraps of sanity
that still remain to him. Inside, the house
smells like the den of some animal, a house
where the attic would never tempt squirrels
to save walnuts or acorns against any insanity
winter might bring, although even now walnuts
litter the attic in small heaps my father
has left behind. This is the way he locks
the present in place against a past he locks
inside himself. Despite his best efforts, the house
plots against him, whispering secrets my father
chooses not to hear. But dead squirrels
litter the yard like fallen walnuts,
and my father tries to buttress his sanity
within a litany of remembered wrongs. His sanity
has always been a matter he locked
away from us, covering himself with a walnut
shell of confidence. But this time the house
is a shambles, the bodies of dead squirrels
a testimony to insanity that even my father
has trouble ignoring. He remembers his own father
marshaling fleets of Buicks and Caddies against insanity.
Outside the house the fleet of dead squirrels
arrayed around the yard become locks
holding my father against his will in this house
he has carefully provisioned with walnuts.
Now, looking at the scattered walnuts
littering each room of the house, my father
begins to realize that even this house,
his home, can no longer protect his sanity.
At night he dreams of complex deadlocks,
but too soon the dream dissolves as squirrels
slip in to grab walnuts, and the shreds of sanity
become a dream my father wants desperately to lock
outside the house, outside with all those squirrels.
– Bill Stifler
This poem was originally published in Vol. 11 (2011) of Compass Rose.
A sestina is a poem of 39 lines. The first six stanzas each contain six lines all ending with the same six words. The order of the words ending the lines changes in a set pattern with each stanza. The last three lines of the poem are a separate stanza where the six words are again repeated, three at the end of the lines and three in the middle. Some writers use variations on the six words (which I have done here). Others use six rhymes rather than six words as the pattern of repetition. Often, writers will include the six words elsewhere in the poem in addition to the patterned repetitions (which I also do in this poem). Because of the repetition of words, the sestina lends itself to poems addressing obssessions.
This poem is based on a situtation in my father’s life that actually happened (and which became the basis for my initial six words). After the first stanza, I let the pattern of repetitions suggest the evolution of meaning in the poem. In the end, the “father” in the poem becomes a composite of his personality and my own imagination so that the final result goes beyond his individual circumstances and feelings while, I hope, at the same time offers a sense of what mental illness can be like.